Critics might have fallen for Luca Guadagnino’s erotic tennis romp but it’s a vapid string of disappointing choices
I have spent the week and a half since seeing Challengers on the brink of throwing a racquet-trashing, expletive-scattering, McEnroe-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How, for an exhausting Mahut-Isner length of huffing and puffing, practically every single one of the wild swings taken by Luca Guadagnino’s film missed its target and landed out by a country mile? Four-star reviews? Five-star reviews? C’mon, fellow critics. You cannot be serious.
Some points I will concede as inarguable. The film is a box-office champion. And it’s pure fire on the internet, a movie more memeable than even the sainted Saltburn. There are clear generational issues in play: I can see why excitable younger viewers, raised on a largely sexless cinema, have fallen so hard for the film’s sprayed-on sweat and forceful faux sophistication. It’s my senior-tour colleagues I’m staring at with hands on hips, wearing an expression of disbelief. The film they’ve been politely applauding looks to me less a modern classic than another marker of American cinema’s ongoing infantilisation: a Muppet Babies redo of Jules and Jim.
Possibly some spectators were swayed by the spirit of indulgence fostered by the film’s on-screen umpire, handing out code violations as if they were candy. (In actual tennis, those breaches of court decorum have consequences: loss of whole games and matches. Not so in Luca-land.) Swallow those, and maybe you’ll also overlook how neither of the film’s male leads persuade as the whey-bulked jocks observed swaggering around America’s secondary tennis circuits. Even at their most drained, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) resemble the gauche nerds of a thousand other teen comedies, sniggering at their own witless masturbation stories.