Champions

Last night I decided to have a double feature of 65 (for the third time) and then Champions.  I love a feel-good underdog sports movie and this was a lot of fun.  Marcus Marakovich (Woody Harrelson) is an incredibly volatile assistant coach for a minor league basketball team in Iowa.  An altercation with the head coach gets him fired and an accident while under the influence gets him sentenced to 90 days community service as a coach to a basketball team of adults with intellectual disabilities.  His first meeting with the quirky players, including Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), Cody (Ashton Gunning), Craig (Matthew Von Der Ahe), Blair (Tom Sinclair), Benny (James Day Keith), Arthur (Alex Hintz), Marlon (Casey Metcalfe), Showtime (Bradley Edens) and, eventually, Cosentino (Madison Tevlin), and Darius (Joshua Felder), goes about as well as you would expect!  Even though he knows everything there is to know about basketball, Marcus must get to know his players as people before they can start winning games.  The team's eventual success gets him an offer to coach in the NBA but it is when they play in the final game of the Special Olympics that he learns the true definition of a champion.  This features all of the training montages, inspirational locker room speeches, and come from behind wins that have become de rigueur for the genre but it is just so charming it doesn't matter that it is incredibly predictable.  Harrelson is great but I loved watching the actors with real-life intellectual disabilities who play the team members because their interactions with him are hilarious.  I especially loved Tevlin because her comedic timing rivals that of Harrelson!  This might be too crude for some people (it is directed by Bobby Farrelly, after all) but if you can get beyond that, it is very heart-warming and entertaining.