'Champions' review: Too mild-mannered for its own good
(L to R) Casey Metcalfe as Marlon, James Day Keith as Benny, Woody Harrelson as Marcus, Ashton Gunning as Cody, and Tom Sinclair as Blair in director Bobby Farrelly's "Champions." Credit: Focus Features
PLOT A disgraced basketball coach gets a chance at redemption with a Special Olympics team.
CAST Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Kevin Iannucci
RATED PG-13 (some adult sexuality and vulgar talk)
LENGTH 2:03
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE Bobby Farrelly's latest comedy treads a little too carefully.
An ambitious pro basketball coach finds himself wrangling a team of intellectually disabled adults in “Champions.” It’s a premise ripe for comedy and heart-tugging, but also fraught with possibilities for pandering and offense. Given that the director is Bobby Farrelly — who with his brother, Peter, has produced some of the most tasteless (and funniest) comedies of the past 30 years, from “Something About Mary” to “Dumb and Dumber” — it’s surprising to find that “Champions” is too mild-mannered for its own good.
Woody Harrelson plays Marcus, an assistant coach for the minor league Iowa Stallions, who in the middle of a game shoves his boss (Ernie Hudson, as Coach Peretti) and loses his job. A drunk-driving arrest makes things even worse: Now Marcus must do 90 days of community service by coaching the Friends, a Special Olympics team at a Des Moines rec center (Cheech Marin plays its wise and kindly director, Julio). The Friends are not exactly a well-oiled machine: Craig (Matthew Von Der Ahe) talks incessantly about sex, Johnny (Kevin Iannucci) refuses to bathe and one guy’s only skill is a weird victory dance (he’s nicknamed Showtime, played by Bradley Edens).
The Farrelly brothers have a tricky history with disabled characters. They’ve been accused of mockery (remember Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins in “Stuck on You?”) but they’ve also earned praise for frequently casting actors with disabilities. “Champions” is stocked with such actors — many are real Special Olympics competitors — and Farrelly gets a couple of glowing performances from them. Madison Tevlin’s trash-talking Cosentino (the team’s lone female) is a standout, as is Iannucci’s Johnny, whose dream of living independently adds a touch of poignancy.
Harrelson shines as a man learning that there’s more to life than NBA fame, and he has a terrific leading lady in Kaitlin Olson, as Alex. Her insistence on casual sex is refreshing, and her open hostility to Marcus is quite funny.
You won’t find any of the Farrellys’ trademark gross-out gags or gasp-inducing lines in “Champions,” which is written by Mark Rizzo from a 2018 Spanish film, “Campiones.” (Craig’s locker-room stories, though, can get pretty off-color.) Farrelly, making his solo directing debut, clearly wants to avoid condescension or insensitivity, and rightly so. For once, however, his touch might be a little too gentle.
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