Don’t worry. At no point during Bobby Farrelly‘s Champions will you struggle to understand the plot. Everything will be explained to you in great detail. Screenwriter Mark Rizzo (adapting the 2018 Spanish film Campeones) has made sure of that my stuffing as much exposition as possible in his characters’ mouths.
But if you’ve ever seen The Mighty Ducks, or anything with a similarly 1990s-ass premise, you probably aren’t going to be lost anyway. This time it’s Woody Harrelson who plays the arrogant hothead, Marcus, who is sentenced to community service coaching an intellectually disabled basketball team. Does he think he’s above all this? Of course! Does he eventually relocate both his love of humanity and his love of the game? Of course! And does he strike up a relationship with an initially skeptical mom of one of the players? No, actually, it’s an older sister! Score one for originality.
Harrelson, of course, is always fun to watch. Even playing a tired, bristly grump that he’s done variations on before (Wilson, The Edge of Seventeen, the Hunger Games franchise), his laconic charm and affability always shine through. And he can sell a joke, something that this clunky screenplay desperately needs him to do.
Overall, in fact, casting is the best thing Champions has going for it. The always welcome Kaitlin Olson plays the love interest. Olson is similarly adept at playing a character whose seen a lot of bad road that was worn down everything but her wit. The team is also filled with interesting performers. The only crime here is the complete waste of Cheech Marin (as the manager of the community basketball program), for which Farrelly ought to be levied a fine of some sort.
Farrelly’s brother Peter has also recently gone off on a solo directing journey, after decades of the two working as a duo, making 2018’s Oscar winner Green Book. Look, that movie is terrible in its own way but it’s clear that the filmmaking chops in their previous career were not Bobby’s. Champions manages to last for more than two hours without ever even stumbling into a visually interesting composition. That’s to say nothing of the awkward timing of the music cues.
One of the more quietly baffling directorial choices comes during a restaurant scene. There are background actors peopling the other tables, filling out the world of the film in the usual way. But then, during the middle of one scene, a table of them pays their bill, gets up and exits as the conversation among our characters continues. It’s a weird and completely unnecessary distraction, a totally unforced error on Farrelly’s part. And also I couldn’t help but be jealous of those extras because they got to leave.
