Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | May 20, 2026
The thing about the staff here is that we disagree on a lot of things, and most of the time, we let those disagreements lie. But sometimes, someone else has an opinion, and they really want to share that opinion, and six months after the original opinion was published, that person decides to share his opinion after a long-winded opening that uses the word opinion four times.
I really did not like Marty Supreme. I want to say that I at least appreciated Josh Safdie’s craftsmanship and Timothée Chalamet’s performance, but I really didn’t. I basically disliked everything about it. I appreciate a “sports movie” that subverts the formula, but it’s a stretch to even call Marty Supreme a sports movie, because there was not that much ping-pong in this ping-pong movie, and what ping-pong did exist was not particularly engaging. It was erratic and hard to follow and, honestly, about as interesting as one might think watching ping-pong would be.
It’s really just a character study about Marty Mauser, who is kind of a sh**head, obsessed with a sport that no one else really cares about because … it’s ping-pong. He’s insufferably arrogant about how impressive he is at a sport no one has any interest in, and insists on inflating the value of its appeal, which doesn’t really work because it’s ping-pong. So all the terrible, self-destructive choices that Marty makes in the interest of proving himself just seem childish. Dude abandons his pregnant girlfriend, nearly gets himself (and her) killed, humiliates himself, gets involved in a number of scams — all of which go sideways — and ultimately throws everyone who tries to help him under the bus.
Marty Mauser is an asshole. He starts the movie as an asshole, and he ends the movie as an asshole, and maybe that’s the point of Marty Supreme: that people don’t change, no matter how many chances they get or how many times they take the wrong path at the fork in the road. It all feels less like subversion and more like contrarianism. Like Josh Safdie decided to make a movie specifically to annoy me.
People literally die in this film because Marty wants to go to Japan to defeat the guy who defeated him at the world championships so badly that he risks his life and that of his pregnant girlfriend, Rachel (Odessa A’zion, honestly the only person I cared about in this film), so that he can raise enough money to escape the cops and … play ping-pong. And then he does, but because the guy he’s playing is barely a character, and we have so very little interest in seeing Marty redeem himself, the ending feels painfully anticlimactic. Marty — who is somehow both the movie’s protagonist and antagonist — defeats the number one player in an exhibition match basically arranged by a rich guy whose wife Marty is schtupping.
I’ll grant, however, that Chalamet’s performance as Marty Mauser is so convincing that I actively loathe the actor now. I really just wanted him to shut up and listen to anyone else and, like, learn something from the experience besides that it’s OK to continue being a narcissistic prick.
OK, maybe the movie is not actually that bad, because if the point was to make me feel something, it certainly succeeded. It’s just that what I feel is a visceral, seething hatred for a film whose pointlessness filled me with rage. So, well done, Josh Safdie?
