With the notable exception of “Shallow Hal”, a vastly underrated & powerful comedy about prejudice against all forms of physical disabilities, not just fat shaming, Bobby Farrelly & his director/writer partner & brother Peter’s films are fairly pedestrian. They last worked together as filmmakers on “Dumb and Dumber To”, although Bobby had a small role in Peter’s bio-comedy from last year, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever”. Enter Champions, a film on which Peter is not involved. Again we have prejudice about the disabled as the major theme, but this time it’s intellectually disabled that are the heroes. And heroes they are, saving the soul of Marcus Marakovich (Woody Harrelson), a self-centered, H-League assistant basketball coach with a bad temper. Although his basketball knowledge is NBA level, he has no interpersonal skills and cannot empathize with his players whatsoever. The film opens with Marcus watching film, preparing for his team, the Iowa Stallions’ next game while laying in bed after having sex with Alex (Kaitlin Olson of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fame), whom he met through an online dating service. He couldn’t care less about her and calls her “darlin’”. Alex is the polar opposite of self-centered, sports-obsessed Marcus. She points out that he has but one book in his apartment. We learn later that she ekes out a living producing, directing & starring in Shakespeare plays for middle schools.
Right out of the gate, as an audience, we wonder if, like the subject of the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter composition, “Comes a Time”, “the day may come when [Marcus] can’t feel at all”. After Marcus has a run-in with the law, Stallions’ head coach Phil Perretti (Ernie Hudson of Ghostbusters fame) tells him the front office fired him. Marcus is given a sentence of 90 days community service as the basketball coach for Des Moines’ Special Olympics team, the Friends. The Friends practice and home court is in an old, rundown community center run by Julio (Cheech Marin). The Friends are in real life all intellectually disabled adults and include: Johnny (Kevin Iannucci, whose performance is incredible), an aquaphobic extrovert with Down syndrome; Darius (Joshua Felder), who has a brain injury, and is the best player on the team but won’t play for Marcus; Showtime (Bradley Evans), who loves the NBA but will only shoot backward; Arthur, a savant, who Marcus calls Wikipedia; and Cosentino (Madison Tevlin) who also has Downs, is the Friends’ motivator/go-between for Marcus & his assistant Sonny (Matt Cook). The theme song for the motion picture epitomizes the Friends’ philosophy of life – their mantra – which, through the sheer force of their will, Marcus adopts: Chumbawamba’s 1997 classic “Tubthumping” (aka “I Get Knocked Down”).
Champions has been criticized as: predictable, which it is not if predictability is measured by its ending, and if not, I assume predicting the first two acts has some meaning to someone in his or her late 20s or 30s, on Twitter somewhere, living in his or her parents house; insensitive to the intellectually disabled, which it is NOT – exactly the diametric opposite in fact; and not funny, to which I can only say, “Get out o’ [your parents house], light out and look all around”. This movie is pure beauty, especially if you just happen to have been an assistant coach of the Waterbury CT Special Olympics basketball team in the early-mid-’80s, who was really the coach – teaching plays & defense & screens & the pick’n’roll – since the co-head coaches were muckety-mucks in the city’s intellectually disabled adults fundraising community, working their magic through their contacts to keep the Waterbury Special Olympics program running. Yep! That was me: a crappy coach helping wonderful human beings who “get knocked down, but [they] get up again. You’re never gonna keep [them] down.”
As of this writing, Champions is available for streaming on various platforms including On Demand, Prime Video, and Apple TV. The best movie I’ve seen released this year so far, despite the criticism, in spite of its lack of accolades – awards season begins in six months, after all – other than the Heartland Film’s 2023 Truly Moving Picture Award Winner, CinemaScore’s “A”, and this movie reviewer’s 4-Stars!
* Paul is the host for The Hub on Canal’s monthly Art in the Form of Film series. The Hub on Canal is a non-profit art gallery/collective in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
Champions Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlnB1nleL7g
