Challengers

By Joanna Langfield

Scores major points for its sweaty style, but this tennis triangle could have won it all had we felt more was on the line.

Filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has netted quite the trio for his teasing and often tantalizing tale. We find out through a series of flashbacks that Art and Patrick were doubles champs at the US tennis Open when they were just kids. At a fancy celebratory function, they meet the girl with the dazzling promise, the phenom Tashi, played by the always captivating Zandaya. When the three of them get together at their hotel room later, well, as we say, let the games begin.

The action (and there is plenty of it, on and off the court) takes us through several years, as Tashi suffers a career ending fall in college, Patrick loses his edge and Art seems to win it all, including Tashi and a whole bunch of professional titles. But his luck may be turning. And maybe Tashi isn’t good with that.

As the woman in the middle, Zendaya doesn’t give a whole lot away. Of emotion, that is. Is her Tashi just a highly sexualized mean girl, playing these two guys off of one another to get what she wants? Or is she truly at deuce point, drawn evenly between the two very different men?

Josh O’Connor does the best he can as the has been who just can’t move on. But pull your eyes off of Zendaya (I know that’s asking a lot) and take a look at what Mike Faist is doing with what could have been a milquetoasty part. Faist, who was superb in West Side Story, brings much needed emotion to every scene he’s in here, making us understand and root for him, set up against two very game players.