Champions – Review
123 Minutes, Rated PG-13
Written by Mark Rizzo
Directed by Bobby Farrelly
**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Woody Harrelson stars in the hilarious and heartwarming story of a former minor-league basketball coach who, after a series of missteps, is ordered by the court to manage a team of players with intellectual disabilities. He soon realizes that despite his doubts, together, this team can go further than they ever imagined.
Another “athlete/coach makes a bad life choice and has to rediscover their love of the sport and/or become a better person” movie.
The Hard Way. The Mighty Ducks. Heck, even The Bad News Bears all played on this trope, so why not go back and dip that well one more time?
But since the team in question here is comprised of people with mental disabilities, it might make the typical formula a bit problematic for our loser-coach du jour: Woody Harrelson.
Problematic… that’s a word I actually hate, as it’s often used in varying scenarios to simply mean “something I don’t like,” which is ridiculous.
But there’s another word that could be used, and is, in fact, used in the film itself, to explain my difficulty in describing this movie: exploitative.
Is it exploitative to use people with mental disabilities as a motivation for “normal” characters to experience growth or make themselves look good?
The knee-jerk answer is probably “yes,” but I think Champions is using a bit more nuance, and I’ll try to explain why.
The basketball team Woody’s character (Marcus) has to coach is made up of persons with actual mental disabilities, so their “performances” are limited to the script and story, not individual “character” behaviors, which would be “problematic” in today’s environment if a “normal” actor played the role (think Sean Penn in I Am Sam or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump).
And it’s the performances of those actors that make the movie so much damned fun. The script is built in such a way for the audience to laugh WITH the team (“The Friends”) and AT Marcus, not the other way around.
There’s the obligatory romantic angle wedged in here, but that’s mostly to provide Marcus one more chance to make a fool of himself and/or grow a bit more while deciding what his priorities really are.
There’s a heartbreaking scene between Marcus and Darius, a player who refuses to play for him, and the reason why isn’t revealed until late, when we see the real growth Marcus has undergone.
So, for a film that some people might feel is a bit dated, or “problematic,” or whatever, Champions really does pack more in that I had originally thought likely from the trailer, when it seemed like the exploitive fluff it easily could have become.
Champions hits theaters March 10 and stars Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin, and Matt Cook.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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