Challengers Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Challengers Blu-ray Movie Review

No man's land.

Reviewed by Randy Miller III July 11, 2024

What if Wild Things was set in the world of mid-level professional tennis? While Luca Guadagnino's much talked-about tennis melodrama Challengers includes no murder or shady private investigators, it does depict three main characters treating each other terribly with plenty of gratuitous sex appeal to spice things up. (There's even a gender-swapped re-enactment of that older film's most infamous scene.) But as viscerally tempting as Challengers can be, this 131-minute test of patience asks an awful lot of its audience and ultimately wrings less juice than you might expect out of a fitfully engaging premise. Yet even though I rolled my eyes more than a few times, I kept watching.

Challengers' story is told in a non-linear narrative, which occasionally creates a few palpable dramatic moments but mostly works against its overall flow and enjoyment. It begins and ends in the present, where former friends Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson (Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist) face off in the finals of a low-level tournament in New York while the crowd, including Art's wife and coach Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), looks on. It's immediately clear that there's history between these three and, as the grueling match unfolds, we pop back to different points in the film's fractured timeline to witness how all three got here. Time is split evenly between the present, recent past, and their first shared meeting as teenagers roughly thirteen years ago, when Tashi was an up-and-coming tennis star in her own right while childhood pals Patrick and Art competed as doubles. Their mutual attraction for her soon leads to a power play for the calculating, aggressive Tashi, who points their competitive spark in a darker direction before a career-ending injury shifts her own mindset towards that of a full-time master manipulator (and loving mom, apparently).

Spelling out its full story, which probably does include as many twists and turns as Wild Things or your average soap opera, would likely hinder any new viewer's enjoyment of Challengers and, with a few minor exceptions, that's really the only ace up its sleeve. Almost everything else about this film -- the endless time jumps, gratuitous slow-motion sequences, that annoyingly distracting tournament umpire, and a rare soundtrack whiff by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (who scored Guadagnino's previous film, Bones and All, in a much more cohesive way) -- feels like a hindrance. The collective weight of Challengers' easy-to-spot faults gradually creates an almost totally disjointed and frankly kind of exhausting experience exacerbated by mostly unlikeable characters. Overlong, overwrought, and overbearing, it wears out its welcome by the halfway point yet asks its viewers to be patient for at least another hour.

These roadblocks are too great to consider Challengers a fully-formed or "statement" film that has something to say about masculinity, masochism, or even relationships in general, and a lack of character growth basically subverts the length of this journey. Even so, I did appreciate some of the parallels drawn between athletic competition and this kind of "love triangle" (for lack of a better word), as well as the path Tashi goes through after her injury -- it's clear that Challengers delivers most of its message through her, as sporadically vague as that message might be. Performances are fine for what they are, with each primary actor doing a respectable job of portraying their characters at different ages (aided by a bit of visual smoothing, clearly) while obviously putting in a few physically demanding days. Yet there ultimately aren't enough positive elements to consider Challengers more than a blip in pop culture history; it did solid business at he box office and created plenty of buzz, but this is not the kind of film people will still be talking about in another few months, let alone years. Occasional base-level thrills aside, it's way more style than substance.

An in-depth commentary or interview with the director may have shed some light on Challengers that I missed, and a featurette or two about its visual effects or physical training could have helped me appreciate some of its fundamentals a little more. Yet we predictably don't get any bonus features on this Amazon MGM film (which I'll never get used to typing) distributed by Warner Bros., which offers only solid A/V merits and, surprisingly, no 4K option.

Challengers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Challengers is nothing if not visually ambitious and uses a presumed mix of film, digital, and "full CG takeovers" to ensure that first-time viewers will probably spot at least one or two cinematic perspectives they haven't seen before. Static shots and hand-held footage abounds, of course, as well as a few interesting POV angles (human and ball) and even a below-the-ground shot that only made sense in The Polar Express because it was seen through ice. So while a couple of these unique angles actually end up working against its sense of visual storytelling (mainly, what's happening during certain stretches of the final match), I at least appreciate the creative team's choice to try something different. Regardless, Warner Bros.' Blu-ray -- which again, sadly includes no 4K UHD option -- features a solid 1080p transfer that largely excels in the areas of fine detail, color reproduction, and depth, with this dual-layered disc obviously letting the film breathe with a supportive bit rate from start to finish. A handful of night scenes show light signs of clumpy noise and/or macro blocking, but for the most part this is as good as fans could ask for on Blu-ray.

Challengers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Dolby Atmos mix again excels despite at least one fundamental shortcoming; namely the original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose brand of music -- which the optional English subtitles identify as both "synth pop" and "techno" on separate occasions -- just simply doesn't mesh well in the areas that it's haphazardly inserted into the film. (More often than not it's routinely distracting, sonically repetitive, and predictably stops on a dime for dramatic effect.) Needless to say, I didn't like it. However, almost every other element of this Atmos mix is perfectly agreeable including crisp dialogue, rear-channel discrete effects for crowd noise and other sports-related ambiance, and sporadic use of the height channels in appropriate places. I'm not going to let my general disagreement with its music hinder the rating, though, because objectively it's a competent mix that makes pretty satisfying use of the format.

Challengers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This one-disc release ships in a keepcase with eye-catching cover art, a matching slipcover, and a Digital Copy redemption code. No extras of any kind are included, which is a serious disappointment.

Challengers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Luca Guadagnino's Challengers finds the director spinning his wheels after his mostly more engaging earlier films such as Bones and All and of course Call Me by Your Name, with only faint whiffs of this sexually-charged sports melodrama registering as much more than cheap thrills. It quite simply drags on for too long and its mostly unlikeable characters undergo very little growth; once again, more judicious editing -- as in "shorter scenes, not shorter shots" -- may have smoothed things over a little. Challengers may be at least worth a watch, but this disappointingly barebones Blu-ray from Warner Bros. doesn't exactly scream "blind buy" and is thus for established fans only.