Challengers follows a tennis couple as they push to return to greatness and explore their relationship from the past.
The folks at Warner Brothers were kind enough to send us Challengers, staring Zendaya, for the purpose of our review. The film follows three tennis players that become part of a love triangle while also keeping their focus on their game. Tennis is one of those sports that I only can enjoy watching when I can watch one of my favorite players, Venus or Serena for their skill or John McEnroe with his energy and attitude. Even when watching them, it still isn’t a sport I really enjoy watching. I would rather play and I’m terrible at it.
I knew watching this film would center most of it around the game and I intentionally went into this with the plan to focus my review on the story, relationship and production itself but not on the sport. The production quality of the film was absolutely great, transitioning between decades back and forth, the characters looked perfect in their ages, so good in fact that you’d believe that there really was that much time between parts of the filming. The acting of the cast was fantastic, I expect there to be awards for this film, seriously.
Most of the story it was hard for me to engage with due to the heavy focus on the game but by the end it tied itself up cleanly and didn’t take the “logical” ending I expected, which is rare. Holy crap though, that ending was utterly fantastic, well written and brilliantly acted. Their tennis skills, as far as I could tell, were just as brilliant too. I wouldn’t be surprised if we learned that they all truly play with the level of skill and passion as they were able to display. That or the director and effects team out did themselves.