Challengers **1/2

While attempting a chic perspective on progressive egotism and its hopeful resolve to humility, Challengers pleasures itself with unbridled Gen-Z horniness. The outcome is both refreshing and monotonous, like Luca Guadagnino’s style-before-substance directing and superfluous timeline toying. There’s a sports movie in here too, but that mainly consists of flash cuts, closeups, and occasional lines like, “Are we talking about tennis?”

The good news is that there is not a second wasted between serves, vollies, and salacious desires in the threesome character (b)romance. This is the filmmaking of today, satisfying the TikTok brain with an array of nonsensical flashbacks and sex when things get too talky.

The performances in this “serious” rom-com are outstanding. I’ve admired Zendaya’s angsty acting since The Greatest Showman days, and the counterbalance in sophisticated newbies, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, glides well during the first half of the movie.

There’s just not enough substance or believable exposition to justify the chemistry in the second half. One wonders if a chronological approach with less locker room talk would have aided the characters’ transition from selfish flings to selfless reflections. There’s also not enough cerebral pull in the script to warrant all the brain noise in the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score. This digital fuzz worked in The Social Network (2010) and my favorite of last year, The Killer, but it’s a melodramatic sore thumb distraction in this one. (Imagine the Yello “Oh Yeah”-accompanied ending to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off while watching two men talk tennis in a sauna.)

If there are comparisons to movies like this when I was in my twenties, I’d bring up Toback’s Two Girls and a Guy (1997) and Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001). Challengers might say it is Wimbledon (2004) on Viagra. If the two-men-and-one-woman emotional entanglement is done perfectly, it is still Jules et Jim (1962). Regarding the tennis movie, I still prefer Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005).

Like most of today’s flicks, it is all backhand material.

**1/2 out of *****