Imagine my surprise when I discovered Challengers is doing very well both at bringing people into theaters and racking up a startling number of positive reviews from critics too. Me? I thought it was silliest soap opera I’d seen in quite a while.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino of Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria (2018) fame, Challengers is a about a love triangle involving three tennis players that persists through thirteen tedious years, from 2006 to 2019. We get their professional triumphs and flameouts as well as their personal shenanigans that include endlessly troubled relationships, cheating hookups, and lots of betrayals and backstabbing on repeat. The selling point is that it’s all supposed to be heatedly erotic, featuring many sex scenes with various combinations of the three attractive leads.

Zendaya, who also produces, stars as Tashi, an idolized tennis ace in high school and college with an empty social-conscience line of patter whose career-ending injury pushes her into coaching. She dazzles two other young tennis champs who are best friends and quite attracted to each other as well. There’s nice, shy, blonde Art (Mike Faist) who goes on to become a major tennis star and marries Tashi. And there’s the rich, dark, bratty, bad-boy type, Patrick (Josh O’Connor). He has a long-distance affair with Tashi before she marries Art. His erratic career involves flashes of brilliance in an overall professional slide that leads to an increasingly seedy existence playing more obscure matches and living out of his car.