'Marty Supreme' First Review: Timothee Chalamet Exudes Brilliance In A Wild Ping-Pong Ride Of Chaos

Timothee Chalmet is back on the big screen with his new sports drama, Marty Supreme. Directed by Josh Safdie, the new film has the fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping-pong rally. What makes it interesting is that it is played by a single player running around the table. It's a marathon sprint of bizarre tragedies and uproar. To put it lightly, Marty Supreme is a sociopath-screwball nightmare, like something by Mel Brooks.

However, in place of gags, the audience will be treated to detonations of bad taste, cinephile allusions, alpha cameos, frantic deal-making, racism and antisemitism, sentimental yearning, and erotic adventures. It's apparently a farcical race against time where no one needs to eat or sleep. The film will be released on December 25, 2025, in the US, December 26, 2025, in the UK, and on January 22, 2026, in Australia.

Timothee Chalamet's 'Marty' is a lanky motormouth hustler

Timothee Chalamet plays 'Marty Mauser' in the film, Marty Supreme. The actor's character is a tall, skinny chatterer with the glasses of an intellectual, the moustache of a movie star, and the physique of a funny-looking cartoon character. His role is said to be loosely inspired by 'Marty (The Needle) Reisman', a real-life US table tennis champ from the 1950s who was given to Bobby Riggs-type shenanigans: betting, hustling, and showmanship stunts.

Talking about the film itself, it compensates for the price of the ticket with just one scene, a gasp-inducing setpiece involving whippet-thin Timothee Chalamet, a dog, a bathtub, cult director, Abel Ferrara in a walk-on role, and a scuzzy New York hotel room. Similarly, disorienting in the climactic revelation, fans get a peek of Timothee's naked buttocks prior to one of the most upsetting displays of corporal punishment since Lindsay Anderson's If…

Marty Supreme is the journey of a ping pong dream

'Marty' is a young Jewish guy working in a New York shoe shop in the early 1950s, while dreaming of world-conquering success in the up-and-coming sport of table tennis. The young man wants to be a success and patent his own brand of ball called the Marty Supreme. However, other subplots keep the audience engaged, including his affair with his married childhood sweetheart, 'Rachel' (Odessa A’zion).

While there is the heat from the forbidden love, 'Marty's' ambition is equally as powerful as he is saving up his earnings to travel to Britain for the table tennis championships at Wembley. However, the first of many bizarre uproars was 'Marty', actually getting the promised cash. Nonetheless, once in Blighty, brash he deliberately shocks British sports journalists with crass jokes about his pal and fellow player, a Hungarian-Jewish camp survivor called 'Bela', played by Geza Rohrig.

Erotic obsession and the chaos that follows 'Marty's' world

Having hustled and blustered his way into a free room at the Ritz, 'Marty' forms an erotic obsession with a fellow guest, retired movie star, 'Kay Stone', a role for which Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement. However, 'Kay's' later Broadway debut is wonderfully realised with a stunned 'Marty' in the audience.

Talking about his game, 'Marty's' table tennis face-off with Japan's ping pong superstar, 'Koto Endo' (Koto Kawaguchi) ends in disaster, and 'Kay's' husband and the ping pong star's possible sponsor, 'Milton' (Kevin O'Leary) shows himself to be bigoted to both 'Marty' and 'Bela'. The film quickly switches back to the US, where pure chaos reigns, a nonstop hellzapoppin' meltdown as 'Marty' frantically tries to claw together the cash for a rematch with his Japanese nemesis, and with the charismatic 'Kay'.

A ping pong rollercoaster, the audience didn't think would be possible

The film's comic and absurdist effect resides in the slowly dawning realisation that it's not actually about the game at all. Marty Supreme doesn't act like a sports film; rather, there are no training montage sequences, no scenes in which 'Marty' explains his technique in voiceover, no scenes in which he either listens humbly to some ping pong mentor or Oedipally rejects him. In fact, unlike Forrest Gump, who becomes a patriotic celebrity through his table tennis gift, 'Marty' is always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts.

However, it is arguably his pioneering 1950s work popularising the sport that made Forrest Gump's ping-pong pre-eminence in the 1960s possible. Critics believe that the film itself is like a ping-pong match; the rhythm and spirit of table tennis are in every scene, and the mesmeric effect of the spectacular, clattering, dizzying back-and-forth. Marty Supreme is on its own spectrum when it comes to determination and emotional woundedness, and Timothee Chalamet hilariously enacts an unstoppable live-wire twitch, powered by indignation and self-pity. 

A marvelous ride of absurdity and growth

By the end of the film, the audience will be swaying from side to side as if the neurons had turned their body into a bell. While the catastrophes, the stunts, the shocks, the jabbering desperation, and 'Marty's' supercharged neediness, with everything important in his life being thrown away, including the box of 'Marty's' patented table tennis balls that goes out of the window, the change at the end comes as an absurd growth. As our pint-sized hero always comes back and even achieves a poignant kind of maturity in the final shot. It's safe to say that the pure craziness is truly a marvel.

Are you excited to watch Marty Supreme? Let us know.

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