Depending on which side of the internet you’re on, you either found out about Marty Supreme from the Nahmias x Marty Supreme jackets, an event for which hundreds of fans and fashion enthusiasts camped outside the New York City pop-up shop for hours, from star Timothee Chalamet standing on the Las Vegas sphere with his newly-shaved head or from his return as “Timmy Tim” on an Esdeekid “4 Raws” remix. In the weeks prior to the film’s release, it seemed like Chalamet was everywhere, frantically waving his arms around, shirtless on a pogo stick, trying to get the public to watch his orange ping-pong movie. Everywhere you went, the four words were repeated like a mantra: Marty Supreme Christmas Day.

I wasn’t doing anything on Christmas, or the day after, so I found myself heading down to the Dundee Theater to catch a 7 p.m. showing of the Josh Safdie sports drama. Two and a half hours later, I walked out of the cinema with a half-empty bucket of popcorn and an even emptier brain. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was expecting — but certainly not whatever I had witnessed.

The film is set in 1950s New York, where Chalamet plays “Certified Worst Guy Ever,” aka Marty Mauser, a cocky shoe salesman who wants to make it as the American ping-pong champion. After Marty gets beaten by Koto Endo, a deaf Japanese ping-pong player (played by actual deaf Japanese ping-pong player, Koto Kawaguchi), he spends the rest of the movie trying to scrounge up enough money to fly to Japan and play in the world championship.

The film is mainly about the insane journey Marty takes, juggling his (married) girlfriend, Rachel (Odessa D’Azion), who suddenly becoming pregnant, making promises he can’t keep and dragging everyone around him into ruin, all in his relentless pursuit of greatness.

The film moves at a rapid speed, like rapidly swiping through a brain-rotted kid’s Instagram Reels page. One moment Marty is arguing with his friend Wally (Tyler, The Creator) about whether Rachel’s child is his, and in another second, the bathtub he’s sitting in crashes through the floor, leaving a naked Chalamet to scramble out of the tub, water spraying everywhere.

The film leaves you with no room to breathe. Just when you think things couldn’t get worse, they do — all within the span of a couple of seconds.

Some might find the film’s speed and frantic energy exhilarating, but sometimes it leads the train to crash. For instance, the film sets up the importance of these orange ping-pong balls Marty asks his friend to make –– the orange balls are introduced in the beginning, and then are reintroduced halfway through the film, just for the balls to get (literally) thrown out the window and never mentioned again.

“He has access to like, a hundred ping pong players who would benefit from the orange ping pong balls,” said College of Arts and Sciences junior, Kyle Trimino, who came with me on my second watch of the film.

Selling the balls was never floated as an idea. It’s like if Chekhov’s gun was introduced, reinforced, Chekhov gets in a knife fight, and then he throws the gun out the window.”

The first time around, the movie felt like a quirky and polarizing rollercoaster. The second time, it felt more like a nauseating headache. The novelty had worn off, and the movie’s frenetic pace made me carsick rather than excited.

The film sometimes feels aimless in its high energy and with the edgy pointed dialogue. There’s lots of scenes of people yelling over each other, which at times just gave me a headache.

“You immediately forget this takes place in the ‘50s since the dialogue and the accents don’t fit in with the time period,” said Trimino.

Indeed, the dialogue sounds very modern. Everyone who speaks in this film talks like they’ve held a smartphone before. Marty is the worst case of this. His cadence is almost identical to the way Jake Paul would speak in a boxing press conference.

In my opinion, Marty Supreme wanted to be something great, but ended up falling flat on its face, becoming another run-of-the-mill “A Man Strives for Greatness but There Are Consequences” Oscar-bait movie.

The movie leaves you on the edge of the seat at times, but in others, it drops the ball and fails to deliver. Perhaps if the film was as compelling as the marketing, we wouldn’t be hoping for anything more.