Champions is a feel-good underdog movie that doesn’t punch down

When the director has been responsible for some icky punch-down comedies, this compassionate approach is very welcome.

Cheech Marin and Woody Harrelson in Champions. Picture: Shauna Townley/Focus Features

The similarities between The Mighty Ducks and Champions are legion.

Both are about arrogant men who have allowed their tempers or foibles to stymie their greatness. Both movies feature them being sentenced to coach a community sports team after they were caught drink-driving.

And both protagonists end up being romantically involved with a female relative of one of the players.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a sports underdog story hews so closely to what came before – although this shares so many of the same beats as The Mighty Ducks – because part of the appeal of the genre is that comforting familiarity.

Champions is indeed a very comforting movie. The only way to dial up the feel-good factor would be to pack it out with a sloth of Care Bears.

But feel-good doesn’t have to be a bad thing. With the right balance, feel-good is exactly that, and without the obvious emotional manipulation. Director Bobby Farrelly balanced out the sentimentalism with a sassy ensemble, led by Woody Harrelson’s reliably spiky energy.

What makes Champions distinct is it is spotlighting characters with intellectual disabilities – and it does it with sensitivity.

Champions is a feel-good sports underdog story. Picture: Shauna Townley/Focus Features

Marcus (Harrelson) is an assistant coach of a minor league basketball team, and he’s suspended after he pushes the head coach during a game. He loses his job and then potentially his freedom when he drunkenly hits a cop car.

Given the choice between 18 months in prison or coaching a local basketball team, the Friends, Marcus takes the latter option.

For Marcus, the role is a legal obligation, and he is desperately casting around for a big leagues gig, but – as is the case in these types of movies – he soon learns that relationships are more than just transactional or utilitarian.

And the team, including Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), sweet Benny (Special Olympics athlete James Day Keith), spicy Consentino (Madison Tevlin) and the prodigiously talented Darius (Joshua Felder), have great potential.

He also starts to get into a relationship with Alex (Kaitlin Olson), a local actor who he hooked up with on a Tinder date and is later revealed to be Johnny’s sister.

While the story is about Marcus’s growth as a person, learning to ground himself within a community, to see people for their worth as full humans and not just as a future basketball statistic, Champions does a lot to share that screen time.

Champions is in cinemas now. Picture: Focus Features

It makes the effort to develop the wider ensemble of characters, especially the characters with intellectual disabilities. There’s no patronising pitying or lumping everyone together as a type. Each character has their own personality and the core ones have their own arcs.

The writing grounds the characters within their contexts, including the challenges they face at home or in the workplace, but it doesn’t allow their disability to define them. What defines them are if they’re a good brother, if they’re a passionate baller, if they have the cutting-est of witty retorts.

Perhaps that’s what’s most surprising for this movie directed by a Farrelly brother, considering his oeuvre includes Dumb and Dumber, Shallow Hal, Stuck on You and Me, Myself and Irene. Champions never makes those characters the butt of any jokes.

There’s a compassion and empathy here that was elusive in Farrelly’s earlier works, most of which revelled in punch-down comedy. So, maybe everyone, even the filmmaker, gets to have a growth story.

Champions is in cinemas now

Rating: 3/5