WARNING: SPOILERS

Yeah, I don’t get the ending, either.

Someone online said it’s Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) loving and forgiving one another after all these years, which is all Tashi (Zendaya) ever wanted, and that makes as much sense as anything. Except it doesn’t make much sense. The Tashi who starts the threeway with the boys 13 years earlier, then pulls back so they kiss each other, and then smiles at the result, well, that’s no longer this Tashi. Her dreams died with her ACL injury, her competitive drive was sublimated through Art, who became her hubby and a Grand Slam champion, and she became a harridan who maybe ran him into the ground. Meanwhile, every half-dozen years, she’d sneak out for a quickie with Patrick. 

Seriously, are there no other men in the world?

When the movie began, among the warnings was the film’s “graphic nudity,” and I leaned over to Patricia and said, “That means male.” I was half joking but 100% right. The director of “Challengers” is Luca Guadagnino, who directed “Call Me By Your Name,” and he ain’t shy in the locker room scenes. It’s like a 1980s teen movie but with guys.

Homoerotic droplets of sweat
“Challengers” is good for a while, with rocketing editing and great CGI tennis, but do we get unstuck in time too much?

It begins at a “Challengers” match in New Rochelle, NY, in 2019, where Grand Slam champion Art Donaldson is making a surprise appearance because his wife feels he needs this confidence-booster before the U.S. Open. Feels like that’s just asking for trouble. If he wins it’s expected, and if he loses it’s shattering.

The trouble comes in the form of another entrant, the down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig, who we first see flirting with an unattractive hotel clerk to get a room for the night. Meanwhile Art and Tashi are living in suites. Guess what? They all knew each other back in 2006.

And back we go. In 2006, Toshi is a rising star in the circuit, and Art and Patrick are the junior doubles champs who are given the McEnroe-Borg nicknames “Fire and Ice.” Patrick is the fire, who nails winning shots from between his legs like Roger Federer, but he doesn’t seem that fiery. He’s more sideways than straight on. Art, meanwhile, feels less ice and more lukewarm water.

Both boys are besotted with Tashi, who uses her status and looks to engineer the three-way in which the boys wind up smooching. But this isn’t revelatory to either one; they still want her. So she pits them against each other: whoever wins their match the next day gets her phone number. Kind of a dick move. Anyway, Patrick, the dick, wins and they hook up.

Except Patrick turns pro and tours, while Tashi and Art study at Stanford. Art subtly works to break up the couple but his machinations aren’t necessary. Patrick isn’t winning his tournaments, Tashi can’t stand hanging with such a loser, he storms out. That’s when she tears her ACL. I don’t know if she blames Patrick for not supporting her from his usual courtside seat, but it feels that way. She yells at him, Art yells at him, both are through with Patrick. The ACL never heals, she’s done, and there’s Art.

Seriously, are there no other men in the world?

That’s our divide. Art becomes a winner of Grand Slam tournaments (though never the U.S. Open), Tashi rides him hard (she’s the real fire), and they travel the world, hotel suite to hotel suite, with child and nanny/parent. Patrick scrapes together a life on the edge of the circuit. He’s considered one of the 100 or 200 best tennis players in the world, and in this world that means one thing: LOSER.

Though Art wins in New Rochelle in 2019, he keeps sighing, all ennui and defeat, so Tashi bribes Patrick into losing the final match; then they have sex. That final match is interspersed throughout the film. Patrick wins the first set, Art the second, and the rubber match, amid slow-mo, homoerotic droplets of sweat, goes down to the wire. Patrick seems ready to double-fault it away when, pre-serve, he places the ball in the neck of the racket, a signal, 13 years earlier, that he had slept with Tashi. Art, stunned, lets the serve go by. Now we’re at tie-breaker.

We wonder: Will Art get a little fire now? Will he care? Kinda sorta not much. In the final point of the movie, which isn’t the final point of the match—we’re early in the tie-breaker—amid more slow-mo sweat, both men creep closer to the net until Art goes for the overhead slam that actually brings him over the net and into the arms of Patrick; and the two men embrace and smile and laugh again. And from her courtside seat, Tashi rises in slow-mo and angrily screams “COME ON!!” Then she, too, succumbs to smiles and laughter.

And that’s our end.

Fire and nice
Some moviegoers had a problem with not finding out who won. My problem? I didn’t believe any of it. I didn’t believe Art would immediately forgive Patrick for sleeping with his wife—again—and I didn’t believe the ultra-competitive Tashi would laugh at this brotherly or otherwise gesture, and I didn’t believe a point in tennis would go the way this one went—where both players get a foot from the net and still volley. It all felt so stupid.

Does Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes give us any reason to care about these people? Whatever sympathy each might have is undercut: the underdog Patrick is too much a dog, the injured Tashi is too much a harridan, the cuckolded Art is too much a limp biscuit.

I liked the tennis. You felt like you were on a court with 140-mph shots whizzing past. Off the court, it was just three assholes.

The ending: fire and nice