By Mark Jackson
Contributing Writer
R | 2h 30m | Sports, Drama | 2025
Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
“Marty Supreme” is billed as being about a guy who dreamed too big. Some critics are saying this constitutes a career-high performance for Timothée Chalamet. I’m of the opinion that Chalamet already checked that box playing Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.” His current portrayal of the frantic, haywire schemes of an inveterate scammer named Marty Mauser doesn’t even come close.
Mauser is a couple of things: a professional ping pong player on the one hand, and a small-time grifter and con artist on the other. Occasionally, when hustling suckers out of their money via ping-ponging at local arcades, he’s both simultaneously. What he yearns for more than anything is respect, both at home and in his sporting life.
To England and Back
It’s the 1950s. While working at a shoe store, Marty impregnates his girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion), steals money from his uncle Murray (Larry “Ratso” Sloman) and claws his way to an international table tennis tournament in England. There, he further scams his way into an expensive hotel and seduces former movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow).
He might be a world-class ping-ponger, but in the finals, he loses to Japanese superstar Endo (Koto Kawaguchi). Mauser’s dreams of becoming a wealthy, famous world champion go up in smoke.
Mauser returns to New York, as penniless as before, but he’s determined to return to the international ping pong circuit and wrest his rightful spot at the top from Endo. Each of his harebrained schemes to make money is more dangerous than the last. They send him scurrying around New York City, with the now extremely pregnant Rachel — who’s also now in an abusive marriage to one Ira Mizler (Emory Cohen) — in tow.
The problem with “Marty Supreme” is that Marty is supremely annoying. He’s a hugely confident, blue-streak-talking, sallow, pitted-faced weasel. He might have enough self-awareness to admit to being a bit of a rogue or anti-hero whose supreme chutzpah excuses his character flaws. But neither he nor the movie ever acknowledges what he really is: a charismatic young sociopath who destroys every life he comes in contact with.
There’s no character arc. Mauser is dyed-in-the-wool incorrigible. Even after being forced to endure the supreme humiliation of getting bent-over, pants-down, retribution-paddled with a ping pong paddle by a former sponsor he scammed— in front of a room full of guffawing, successful men — he’s back to his scheming ways the very next day.
Fans will likely point to the film’s closing moments, where young Mauser finally sheds a real tear, but that has to do with a Hail-Mary type seismic shift in character, rather than the arc of a progressively learned new behavior. By seeing how a character changes — the uncomfortable work that spans recognizing the truth of who one is, the decision to change, and the follow-through — we can apply the lessons to our own lives. It’s this painful journey that makes for interesting films. But Mauser’s character arc is abidingly stagnant.
‘Uncut Gems’
Throughout the film, I was thinking “This is exactly like “Uncut Gems” (2020). It featured Adam Sandler’s constantly anxious lead character, Howard Ratner, running around like a headless chicken, trying to put out the endless fires he started. I later realized, it’s the same director.
Ratner’s life is an elaborate train wreck waiting to happen. The boulders are sitting on the tracks, looming large, but he always manages last-second to shunt the train down an alternate set of tracks. The character is a cunning yet hapless clown juggling 15 balls simultaneously, and the pressure-cooker anxiety will seriously raise your blood pressure.
Do you really feel the need to go to the movies to raise your blood pressure with worry? Ask yourself if you’ll enjoy raising your anxiety via the frenetic energy of Chalamet’s fairly one-note performance.
Unsurprisingly, the female characters exist only for the little narcissist’s sex life, except for Fran Drescher, who plays his mom. Drescher, sans makeup similar to the recently rebranded Pamela Anderson, is a revelation in her muted, late-career beauty. Who knew there was a subtle, dramatic actress underneath the hysterical nasally rasp of “The Nanny” star? It’s a shame she’s given so little to do here.
“Marty Supreme” isn’t about a guy who dreamed too big. It’s a series of loosely tied-together devious shenanigans that will mostly cater to fans of shock-value cinema.
