Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Champions

In fact, the title characters should dominate this story, as they do in the Spanish original. Yes, we learn their names, basic skill sets, eccentricities and, at least superficially, their individual histories. However, the challenges and indignities of their everyday lives are almost casually addressed. Benny (James Day Keith) has a restaurant manager who refuses to release him from work on game days. Conveniently, that boss falls for an utterly silly, transparent ruse. Darius (Joshua Felder), the most talented basketball player in the group, has been traumatized by a drunk driving incident. That revelation and his agreement to join the team, borne of a brief conversation with Coach Marcus, comes across as under-developed in the script by Mark Rizzo (Disney’s Gravity Falls). Credit to him, though, for a line sure to amuse Northwest audiences: “Seattle sucks!” You can discover the context for yourself.

Likewise, the film devotes too little time to the process of actually coaching the team. At the outset, we see their love of the game and their need to learn many of its finer points. We get several poignant moments and enough visual humor. But these young men–and, eventually, one no-nonsense young woman–seem to make a huge leap in their teamwork simply on the basis of acquiring ready transportation in the form of Alex’s Shakespearean-themed RV and entering a tournament for players with disabilities. Champions, like the Spanish movie, requires a “process.” The coach and his players have to expend a certain amount of physical and emotional energy working past their obstacles to achieve the feel-good ending that we, as audience members, want to share with them. In this film, we leap right past a lot of that narrative.

Bobby Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly Brothers well known for their quirky, irreverent comedies (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary) brings a sympathetic eye to this story, but his first-time solo direction plays it relatively safe. Unlike its source material, this picture refrains from going too dark or too deep, even though that would have made the outcome much more satisfying.

The basketball-loving Woody Harrelson, who previously worked with Farrelly in Kingpin (1996), here gives a vanilla performance that makes Marcus seem pretty consistently shallow. Amiable enough, but shallow. Quite the contrast from his much more compelling portrait of the sardonic and inebriated Captain in this past year’s Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, Triangle of Sadness. On the other hand, the ten intellectually disabled actors who play the members of “The Friends” squad bring a wealth of heart and spirit to their performances. If only their backstories and training as a cohesive team–their “superpowers,” as one puts it–had been more central to this story, then Champions would have left a much more lasting impression during this year’s real-life “March Madness.”