'Challengers' briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

            Wow, a movie with brains, brawn, beauty and bite — first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes is almost more deserving of adoration than Luca Guadagnino or Zendaya, and he's also penned Luca’s William S. Burroughs adaptation coming this year too. I have no notes, except of course I do they’re just rarely so glowing.

Before Queer this November, I’ll be sure to revisit the so-called Desire trilogy (a spiritual one that is, with the swoony I Am Love, one of many Tilda Swinton/Luca combos, the sexier psychological ensemble drama A Bigger Splash all culminating in the rare James Ivory screenplay for the sublime Call Me By Your Name) but I managed to locate his debut The Protagonists and attempted to appreciate the macabre-obsessed pretense-overflowing mockumentary. What I will say is his second film, Melissa P., was so generous with the subsequent blowjobs I figured Challengers’ salaciousness had to be a bit more eloquent — those darn Italians! Even if he shares some of the same visual language as Yorgos Lanthimos for a peculiar European director’s accessible arthouse shenanigans (off-center low angle shots are a regular tell), this is Luca peaking out just as hard if not more than Lanthimos with The Favourite. He even gets to show Zack Snyder how slow motion can be used for good.

Seeing Zendaya as producer only makes sense since the movie is tailored to her every need career-wise: a complicated character offers range as an amoral script refuses to draw Tashi as the victim or the good guy, and the whole affair makes her look sexy as hell. It’s a textbook star-making turn, more an exhaustive expression of talent than anything I saw in the MCU Spidey flicks or either Dune put together. Of course between this particular Team Edward / Team Jacob rivalry I’m guessing Mike Faist is the vampire, making Josh O’Connor the lone wolf — anyway I’m team Mike and I don’t think I’ll ever not be on that guy’s side after Spielberg let him show his stuff as Riff in 2021’s West Side Story. For O’Connor I believe Challengers is his similarly great moment of discovery, or when and where he shows what he’s made of as he didn’t have quite enough room to stand out in May December. This love triangle paradigm is off the charts dripping with the rizz famalam, the shared emotional elasticity ready to snap on a dime — The Dreamers wishes its sex movie magic were as electrifying or literary, and unlike Melissa P. there isn’t a single blindfolded penis to the mouth happening here.

But if we’re talking film history likeness, of course this is closest to Woody Allen’s Match Point in that every atom of the technical filmmaking is clicking like clockwork but also there are meaningful metaphors are aplenty, it all becoming so much more about the characters and their mental romantic sportsmanship than swatting balls. However, unlike Woody’s Scarjo-exploit of pervert proportions, Challengers is a true sports movie despite the swinging dicks and Allen-level adultery, taking a subgenre without any real standouts (Battle of the Sexes, nah don't think so) and somehow besting other tired sporting events turned motion picture events like boxing and racing. It’s only too easy to say this is up there for possibly the best sports movie of the past 25 years AT LEAST, alongside cult favorites (I, Tonya, Moneyball), visionary heartbreakers (Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler) and classic crowdpleasers (Ford v Ferrari, Rush, Cinderella Man and whatever recent Rocky movie they say was best, Creed was alright for my money) — I guess I need to see Miracle someday. True dueling spectacle is rarely divvied out with such visceral, verifiable grace and gusto.

And there to help with such gut-busting, frighteningly frenetic energy and spiking testosterone is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross selling you the sweetest study/workout beats you’ve heard in forever to make sure the mathematical, practically perfect editing and modern/classic cinematographic look results in masterly cinematic energy bursting from every aspect radiating from Kuritzkes’ dazzling screenplay, which takes on more chronological criss-crossing than fucking Oppenheimer. The structure lends itself to folding emotional revelations, blistering parallels and sharp, all encompassing themes, yet even if you shuffled the scatterbrained timeskips into chronological order, Challengers would still be an exemplary movie-as-living-novel miracle. When this slows down to just the actors, Guadagnino is checking the gate on indelible takes of palpable enthrallment, edge and exhalation.

I would say this is Luca’s magnum opus by a long shot since for all of Call Me By Your Name’s beauty both scenic and sensory, Armie Hammer somewhat ironically spoils the tenderness and tears in retrospect. This comes out of nowhere since lately Guadagnino has decided to make such dour, brutal detours to fruitless horror revisionism in his interesting, frittering, boring companion piece / surely-not-a-remake of Suspiria, and likewise Bones and All with its cuddly cannibals and such. Between the left-field scares and leftover sex drive from his early career of aromatic, lovelorn repositories, Challengers is the finest mid-budget popcorn entertainment you could want, the most playful mainstream movie or the most approachable “independent” flavor feature in recent memory.

Tashi just wanted to see some great fucking tennis and I just wanted to see a great fucking movie. I love when no one’s got it all but in the end we all get what we want. Challengers deals in all the dichotomies: talent and professionalism, love and lust, opportunity and chance, confidence and psychological torment, all of course in this game of romantic pursuit beneath the 1v1s, from “It’s about a relationship” also “decimate that little bitch.” What a blast. Any sex-averse zoomers, or conversely anyone actually sorry to have missed out on potential soft-core porn, go fuck yourselves.