Champions
“What do I call them if I can’t say the R-word?” asks Marcus (Woody Harrelson), a disgraced minor league basketball coach sentenced to 90 days of community service coaching the Friends, a team whose players have intellectual disabilities. “Their names,” the judge replies.
Bobby Farrelly’s “Champions,” based on the 2018 Spanish film “Campeones,” follows the basic plot of every other inspirational sports movie about a hangdog coach in need of redemption, but with the added cringiness of using its team of Disabled basketball players exclusively as a means toward that redemption while failing to recognize their humanity at all.
Marcus is arrogant and combative and pretty much every other cliche you’d expect from this kind of character at the beginning of this movie. In 2023, it’s hard to see why we should want to spend two hours watching this guy even with the signature charm Harrelson brings to every role he plays. His one night stand turned love interest Alex (Kaitlin Olson) fares little better with characterization, given abysmal lines like “I’m a woman over 40. I have needs.” But thankfully, Olson finds more layers within her performance than are written for her character.
“I’m sorry, I’m new to this,” Marcus says to Alex after making a major gaffe asking how her brother Johnny (Kevin Iannucci) got his intellectual disability. To which she has to explain he was born with Down Syndrome, you don’t catch it. That’s what seems to be presumed by this movie: that everyone watching it is new to knowing anything about intellectual disabilities, and so it constantly explains their existence rather than allowing them to exist.
In an earlier scene, rec center manager Julio (Cheech Marin) tells Marcus about each player’s personal life as voiceover while we see little vignettes of their jobs and homes. But the filmmakers don’t actually spend any time with these characters living their lives instead, we’re shown their lives from an almost anthropological distance. They are seen solely as teaching tools for Marcus and the audience by the filmmakers, not complex human beings worth spending real time with.
Still, plenty of script time is given to Marcus and Alex’s relationship. We see it go from sex to dinner at restaurants to Marcus watching her perform Shakespeare at work to him eventually coming over for their mom’s cheesy meatloaf Monday at her and Johnny’s house.
This disregard for their humanity also does a disservice to the Friends cast Madison Tevlin, Joshua Felder, Kevin Iannucci, Ashton Gunning, Matthew Von Der Ahe, Tom Sinclair, James Day Keith, Casey Metcalfe and Bradley Edens whose star power, charisma and comic timing is wasted on pithy one-liners and dated jokes.
Each character does get an arc but they’re mostly in relation to making it to the Special Olympics North American Regional Championship. By the time credits roll and none of them are listed with the non-disabled stars before the title treatment, it’s not surprising given how little the film ever respects them.
Once they do qualify for Winnipeg there is naturally a halftime speech needed behind late with Marcus giving. And this leads us into what might be the single most cringe-inducing part of “Champions,” as he lets them know they’re already champions because of all the “stuff they put up with from ignorant people every day,” further othering this scrappy crew into tokens despite good intentions.
At the beginning of “Champions,” when Marcus gets fired from his assistant coaching position Phil (Ernie Hudson) tells him he needs to know these kids on a personal level not just as ballplayers. Same goes for filmmakers who need same grace offered toward Friends seeing their whole humanity.
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