Champions Review: Feel-Good Comedy Gets Raunchy

A minor league basketball coach (Woody Harrelson) is court-ordered to manage a team of players with intellectual disabilities.

Universal Pictures

A minor league basketball coach with anger management issues finds his purpose with a scrappy team of intellectually disabled players. Champions has heart and enough humor to keep you chuckling periodically throughout. But it has a few problems that detract from the warm-your-insides intentions. Champions gets downright raunchy and vulgar. There’s no nudity but sex and lascivious dialogue aplenty. The characters spend an inordinate amount of time discussing dirty deeds in colorful ways. This focus felt out of place, overdone, and adds an obscene aspect that wasn’t needed.

Woody Harrelson stars as Marcus, a skilled basketball coach with a bad reputation. He’s prone to outbursts that often lead to physical altercations. Marcus finds himself as an assistant coach for his best friend, Phil (Ernie Hudson), in Iowa. He burns that last bridge when Phil refuses to listen to him during the final moments of a crucial game.

Universal Pictures

Drowning sorrows while being lambasted on ESPN Sportscenter results in a DUI. Marcus faces serious jail time but gets a reprieve. The judge orders him to ninety days of community service as the coach for a local rec team of special needs players known as “The Friends.”

His first day of practice doesn’t go well. Darius (Joshua Felder), their best player, refuses to talk to him and storms off. Showtime (Bradley Edens) only takes one shot… from half-court… turned around backwards. The sweet but odiferous Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), who never showers, offers the only support. Just when Marcus thinks it couldn’t get any worse, he runs into Alex (Kaitlin Olson), a Tinder hookup that went south, who happens to be Johnny’s older sister.

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Director Bobby Farrelly, known for working with his brother Peter on classics like Dumb and Dumber, reunites with Harrelson after they struck comedic gold in the knockdown funny Kingpin. He takes the same lewd outlook here with a varying outcome. The sexual sniping and eventual romance between Harrelson and Olsen makes sense. There’s amorous tension that you believe leads to love. The Friends bantering about ménages à trois, partner swapping, and more smacks unrealistic. Intellectually disabled people can be intimate, jocular, and engage in ribald locker room talk. That’s understood but not to this extreme. The Friends become lusty caricatures for an exaggerated humorous effect. This honestly robs the film of a sweetness factor that it tries to maintain.

A Positive Message

Champions has a predictable narrative that strays into melodrama. The two-hour-plus runtime doesn’t have any surprises. The outcome is never in question. That in itself isn’t terrible. Of course, we want a happy ending for these characters. There’s just too much going on that could have been more concise. Crude subplots add length when meaningful exploration of the supporting characters was possible. Several “Friends” were pretty interesting. We only see snippets of their lives off the court. That said, the film does convey a positive message about the intellectually disabled. They can reach glorious heights and deserve every opportunity to fulfill their potential.

Champions is a production of Gold Circle Entertainment. It will have a theatrical release on March 10th from Focus Features.

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