This big-hearted underdog sports comedy runs on rails, with no great surprises, but it’s likable. It’s the story of Marcus (Woody Harrelson), a washed-up, grumpy basketball coach with a booze problem who gets busted for drunk driving: the judge sentences him to 90 days’ community service coaching a basketball team of teens with learning disabilities.
It’s a remake of a Spanish film called Campeones and inspired by a true story from Spain, but the fact that this film is directed by the broad comedy maestro Bobby Farrelly might remind you of The Ringer, the Johnny Knoxville comedy from 2005 that Farrelly produced with his brother Peter. The Ringer had Knoxville pretending to have a mental disability to compete in the Special Olympics. That film toyed with some grossout bad taste before the inevitable segue to sentimental maturity. Champions doesn’t go anywhere near that kind of laugh-at irony, despite a few initial gags in which Marcus is unsure of what to say instead of the R-word.
Marcus’s own conversion to decency happens when he has a relationship with Alex (Kaitlin Olson), the sister of Johnny (Kevin Iannucci) who is one of the players with Down’s – and she steers Marcus away from his bad attitudes. Alex herself is an actor and has a day job touring middle schools with Shakespeare; she makes witty and unexpected use of The Winter’s Tale to help Marcus coach the side.
Inevitably, the team and Marcus get to know and love and each other and Marcus, just as inevitably, has to make some serious life choices. I was a little disappointed in the final implication that coaching a team like this is not, in fact, what a real alpha-guy actually does, but it’s sweet-natured enough.
• Champions is in UK cinemas from 10 March.
