Champions, directed by Bobby Farrelly, stars Woody Harrelson as an Iowa minor league basketball coach who gets into a drunk driving accident after getting fired due to yet another flare up of his anger issues. Instead of being sent to jail, he’s sentenced to 90 days of community service where he has to coach a team of mentally disabled people. I had expected this to be a very cookie cutter story where someone intelligent, in the colloquial sense, learns that their knowledge means nothing without any emotional intelligence to go along with it. I was correct.
Without taking any of the forks in the road of this very basic narrative structure, there’s a small range of quality that the movie can have. It’s hard to completely hate a movie like this because it appeals to the heart of everyone except for the most devoted of cynics. It’s also difficult to completely fall in love with a movie like this when there are so many that are relatively the same. Think Carl from Up, or Walter Hobbs from Elf, but take all the creativity out of them. The actors, writers, and director all only have so much that they can do to improve or hurt the film in situations like this.
The acting and writing have pretty much the same quality throughout the movie. There are moments where things feel a little phoned in from both Harrelson and Kaitlin Olson, who plays Harrelson’s romantic counterpart and the sister to one of the players, but generally they, and everyone else, are fine. There is one scene where the team is washing up after practice and I think Harrelson’s acting in it is really solid, but that’s really the only standout in the acting department.
The writing follows suit with a few lines of dialogue that feel awkward, but the rest is fine with the occasional good piece. The comedic writing is fairly successful, but it’s not a hilarious movie by any means. I thought the best of the writing came towards the end in the locker room. It’s nothing spectacular, but it executes what it’s attempting to do exceptionally well.
My main issues lie with the directing. It’s not so bad that it ruins the movie, but it holds it back from being great in whatever genre you may categorize it as. They introduce several conflicts, each one resolved instantly, which creates no tension whatsoever. If you want to count the main plot as a conflict, pretty much anyone watching knows from the get-go that it’s going to end in a happy manner for everyone, so no tension there either.
The basketball scenes are entertaining from time to time, but that’s only because we care for the players and are happy to see them do well. The directing in those scenes is actually pretty poor. It’s shot after shot of people making or missing baskets from almost the same angle. The camera needs to move a little more to make the scene more dynamic, it feels too stagnant with the way it is now. If we didn’t care about the characters very much, it would be like watching paint dry.
The movie also feels like it was made by the oldest person ever with its portrayal of memes, tv, and cellphones. You would have to have never made physical contact with another person in your entire life to be more out of touch than the scene where they show Harrelson’s character as a meme. There are no good directing moments in the entire film, sufficient is the best that it gets.
I wouldn’t be doing this film its proper service if I didn’t mention how it approached the topic of inclusivity, especially surrounding those who are mentally disabled. It doesn’t treat people with mental disabilities as less than, and it makes sure that you walk away doing the same. I didn’t feel like it was exploitative in any way, and it does a good job at showing how the real world can be. They also have a scene during the credits where I assume they threw a prom-type event for all of the actors, and they genuinely seem like they’re having such a great time. Some mentally disabled people don’t get the opportunity to attend those kinds of events at school so it’s good to see that they were given the opportunity here.
Final Thoughts
I would recommend this movie if you’re feeling down and just want a happy movie that you haven’t seen before. You likely won’t want to rewatch a film like Champions. But you probably won’t be upset that you gave this one a shot, especially if you’re in that headspace.
