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After the Hunt

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The film, After the Hunt was a film that I missed out on while it was in the theaters earlier this year, but with it coming available on Amazon Prime, I was able to watch it this weekend. I have to say that I found this to be extremely disappointing and mostly a mess.

According to IMZDB, “A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.”

Thing is, this synopsis from IMDB is much more concise than this film is. I’m not sure what the overall story as meant to be, and it felt as if these characters were jumping back and forth in so many different manners that it muddied the waters of the narrative.

There are great actors in the film. Julia Roberts,  Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny all had important roles in the film and they all can really act. There just was too much chaos in the script to allow any of them to elevate the material. Certainly, Julia Roberts had the strongest performance, but there was just so much going on that was needlessly convoluted that it sapped any semblance of her performance.

The score was constantly in the way. I have never been as distracted by the music in a movie as I was with this movie. The score was nonsensical at times and really caused disruptions.

The narrative was scattered around and did not have a comprehensive idea of where it wanted to go. This was compounded by the different characters and what they brought to the story. Some things were brought in for reasons that I am not sure have a purpose.

I found this to be overly long, messy, and wasteful of some strong performances. After the Hunt never really knew what it wanted to be, and that is hat it became.

2 stars

Challengers

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Okay, I looked up the Rotten Tomatoes score for this and it was in the upper eighties, but I found myself hating this movie.

Again, it is not the worst film of the year by any stretch and it will not be on my year’s worst list. I just had plenty of problems with it and those problems hampered my enjoyment of the story.

Zendaya played Tashi, a soon-to-be tennis superstar who chose to go to college before turning pro. She met fellow tennis players and close friends Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist). Patrick and Art were both struck by Tashi, and were interested in pursuing a relationship with her. Patrick and Tashi hooked up first, but their rocky relationship was shaken when Tashi injured her leg playing and could not compete any more.

Tashi and Art get together after this break up and they wind up getting married and having a child together. Meanwhile, Tashi becomes Art’s coach and he wins several Grand Slam titles, failing only to win the US Open. Patrick’s career falls on hard times and he has to hook up with random women to find a place to stay.

Both Patrick and Art wind up in the finals of a smaller tournament and their one-on-one match carried a ton of stakes.

I had a real problem with a bunch of stuff in Challengers. First off, I never believed that the connection between Tashi and Patrick was strong at all. The film seems to want me to think that they have this irresistible pull between them, but I never felt any sort of chemistry with them. Because of this, the character of Patrick was a horrendous person and I did not want to root for him in the slightest. I also did not find myself liking Tashi very much, and I liked her even less as the film progressed. I do not understand some of the motivation for the acts that she did in the film and so she was very unlikable too.

I disliked the scoring of the film too. There would be certain scenes between individuals and then suddenly this pounding music beat into the theater, dominating what was going on. I usually am not struck by scores that much, but this one was so distracting and constantly out of place that I found it troublesome.

No spoilers, of course, but I absolutely despised the ending of the movie. There were some parts of the film that I did not mind and I might have let it slide by if the ending would have brought me something more than it did. The ending was nonsensical and remarkably disappointing for me.

The acting was good. Zendaya was very strong in this role. I did not like her character, but she pulled off what she had to do. Josh O’Connor was great too as I hated his character and it was as much because of his smirky little looks as it was what his character did.

The tennis scenes were excellent. I also really liked how the film set up their storytelling, bouncing around in flashbacks, centered around this ending match between Patrick and Art. The format was well done and the editing to make this work was exceptional. I just did not love the characters or the way the story went.

I found myself very disappointed with this movie and I came out of the theater saying that I hated this one. Hate is a strong word, but there is enough here to ruin what could have been a fascinating film. The ending I did hate, though…

2.5 stars