REVIEW:
Challengers is a weird movie. It’s about three people involved in a love triangle, where the girl (Tashi, played by Zendaya,) continues to have relations with both of the guys throughout the film. These young men are Patrick and Art, and they are both infatuated with Tashi. Now, if that was all there was to this movie, just a back and forth between them, then it would be a little too simple. And the movie knows this. So it shakes things up by having the story constantly move through time in all sorts of intervals.
What that means is, we open in the present day, then double back to the past, when these two boys first meet Tashi. Then we continue to move forward through time, only we constantly jump through multiple years. And all the while, we continue to get flashes and clips from the present day story. It’s a clever trick, and it does actually make the movie a more interesting, trying to put all the pieces of time together like a puzzle.
The two boys meet Tashi, at a party, and it leads to immediate competition between them. They invite her to their hotel room. When she shows up, and they run out of beer, we get the threesome scene, which is more like a hint of a threesome (just kissing.) the days of going all out with this kind of scene, like in Wild Things, are long gone. And what really makes the scene weird is that it ends with Art and Patrick more interested in each other than they are with Tashi. It leaves more questions open then it answers… like does anything happen between the boys after she leaves the room? If they were so into each other, then does anything ever happen between them again?
After the three-way make-out scene, Tashi does start dating one of them (Patrick,) and the movie spins into its second act. This is where Art keeps trying to sabotage the relationship by talking to each of them about the other, trying to break them up. And eventually Tashi gets injured and only Art is there, by her side, not Patrick. So Tashi dumps Patrick, and Art starts dating her. That ends the second act.
At this point, the movie is pretty good. The first two acts have been interesting. Unfortunately the third and final act is the worst and is also the longest (it is about half of the movie.) This is where Tasha continues to have relations with Patrick. The problem is, that we get it. We’ve seen all this before. How many times is she going to go back and forth between the two guys? At least in the second act, there was interesting manipulation by Art. In the third act, it’s like the characters are just going through the motions. For two of the three acts, this movie is okay. But by the third act, it has definitely run out of steam.