Over their first decade of filmmaking, Peter and Bobby Farrelly often championed people with disabilities via characters such as W. Earl Brown’s Warren from There’s Something About Mary, Jim Carrey’s Charlie from Me, Myself & Irene, and Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear’s conjoined twins from Stuck on You. So it’s not hard to see, then, what inspired Bobby Farrelly to remake the 2018 Spanish comedy Campeones, which follows the exploits of a Special Olympics basketball team as they’re led by a disgraced minor league basketball coach.
In Champions, Woody Harrelson plays Marcus, who, after crashing into a cop car and getting a DUI, is court-assigned to lead the Special Olympics basketball team for 90 days. This setup is practically an exercise in legal make-believe, and it’s tone deaf to our current social climate, yet the film’s larger issues lie more in how it uses its disabled characters. Considering the Farrelly brothers’ activism for disability rights and inclusion, the way Champions goes about infantilizing the intellectually disabled comes as a surprise, especially when it repeatedly uses their deficiencies in practice drills or in-game performance as fodder for cheap laughs.
The jokes are pitched to be warm-hearted but are often just flat-out lazy and, at times, mean-spirited, including jabs at one character, Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), who never showers and another, Showtime (Bradley Edens), who will only shoot with his back to the basket. These faults, along with the rest of the players’ on-court failings, are highlighted time and again, so if a joke isn’t funny the first time, you’ll get at least 20 more chances to change your mind.
While the team’s generally poor play serves as an irritant for their helplessly frustrated, curmudgeonly coach, as in The Bad News Bears, the overreliance on the players’ various shortcomings starts to feel condescending, no matter how much fun the actors appear to be having. Also condescending, or at least misguided, is the fact that the disabled team, the Friends, are reduced to secondary characters in Marcus’s redemption story.
The team is presented as inspiring, but aside from a few scenes with Johnny, its members aren’t written as well-rounded people—just extensions of the one goofy trait that distinguishes one from the others. Even Johnny, who gets the most screen time of all the Friends, is outshone by his sister, Alex (Kaitlin Olson), whose tumultuous relationship with Marcus introduces a parade of cloying rom-com clichés into the film, tipping it over into turgid melodrama.
As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.” These songs, and the film’s approach to its subject matter, harken back to the time when the Farrelly brothers were comedy royalty in Hollywood. And maybe it’s because the culture has moved on from both that music and the Farrelly brothers’ brand of comedy that Champions feels stuck in another era. But it’s also the general absence of vulgarity, and comedic risk-taking in general, that causes the film, unlike some of the filmmakers’ earlier work, to feel maudlin and banal in equal measures.
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