It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a decade since we’ve seen an actual Farrelly brothers movie. After 2014’s Dumb and Dumber To, Peter Farrelly went off on his own, won the Best Picture Oscar for Green Book, and released last year’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Yet in all this time, we haven’t seen a solo project from Bobby Farrelly. While he has directed a few episodes of the Trailer Park Boys, and reunited with his brother for the Quibi show, The Now, we have yet to see what differentiates a Bobby Farrelly movie from a Peter Farrelly movie.

Champions, Bobby Farrelly’s first solo film, is a glimpse into a more mature Farrelly, not skimping on the comedy, but telling a more thoughtful story than, say, Movie 43 or The Three Stooges. It reunites him with his Kingpin star Woody Harrelson, who plays Marcus, a minor league basketball coach who gets fired from his job for pushing the team’s head coach (Ernie Hudson) when he didn’t like the play that was being called. This is just the latest outburst that has left Marcus unemployed, and later that night, he goes drinking and driving, which ends with him crashing into a cop car and spending the night in jail. The judge sentences Marcus to 90 days of community service teaching a group with intellectual disabilities to play basketball. The team is known as The Friends and they are aiming to make it to the Special Olympics.
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Maybe one of the most remarkable things about the Farrelly brothers as filmmakers has been the inclusion within their films as they have been casting people with disabilities for decades. They’ve stated that when trying to tell stories about the real world, “it’s not real unless you include everyone,” and they’ve certainly grown over the years in how they utilize representation in their films. As a solo debut for Bobby, Champions is kind of a perfect project, working with an actor he already has a history with, in a comedy (written by Gravity Falls’ story editor Mark Rizzo, based on the 2018 Spanish film of the same name) that feels like the type of film he and his brother would’ve written, and in a story that allows him to cast a brilliant group of actors with intellectual disabilities.

Image via Focus Features

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Champions very much fits into the mold of your typical underdog sports film, where an unlikely coach warms up to a team that “unexpectedly” gets better through his care, but it’s the heart within this story that makes it slightly better than your standard dark horse sports film. It takes its time to let us get to know each of these individual players, instead of just lumping them together as one team. Marcus had a problem on his old team seeing the players as people instead of as stats, and Champions gives us the opportunity to see what makes each of these players an excellent contribution to this team—as well as present their lives off the court.

This is best seen through Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), a player who quickly takes a liking to their new coach, and whose sister Alex (Kaitlin Olson) recently had a one-night stand with Marcus. Through Marcus and Alex’s relationship, we see the difficulties that one might not expect with a story like this. Johnny is extremely independent and wants to move into a group home with his friends on the team—a move that Johnny’s mother also approves of—but there’s the worry that in doing so, Johnny will disappoint his protective sister.

Champions is also largely a story about dealing with disappointment and realizing that good can come even when dreams don’t work out the way you expected. Alex is still living at home, performing Shakespeare in a van for kids that have no interest in the Bard of Avon, but her love for her brother never makes this a problem. Marcus has dreamed of the big leagues, but his passion for the sport has always gotten the better of him. The players themselves have also had to manage their expectations going forward in the world and find the joy in where their lives have taken them.

Image via Focus Features

But Champions is also quite funny at times and works because of its massive amount of heart. This is a film that handles this story with great care, and while at first, Marcus might be ignorant—as we see when he’s sentenced in court—it’s always because of an uncertainty of what the right phrase or action might be instead of out of trying to make a joke. Rizzo’s script always ensures that these players are never the joke, but rather, Marcus is often the butt of them. It’s a smart move since the cast are all comedically gifted. Madison Tevlin, who plays Constantino, the only girl on the team, is a scene-stealer that barrels over Marcus at every opportunity she gets. Iannucci is also particularly funny when he’s at odds with Marcus, and Darius (Joshua Felder), a player who refuses to play for Marcus, can make just saying “nope” funny every time.

Still, Champions is often quite clunky at times, and at over two hours, there’s plenty that could’ve been left on the cutting room floor. It takes far too long to get to the actual basketball team, and the setup for the meat of this story is scene after scene of wooden explanations that drag with jokes that don’t land. Harrelson on his own flounders through the opening, but once the film gets to Marcus and the team, it begins to find its groove. Even though it occasionally falls back into that clunkiness, the heart within Champions makes it more bearable.

It’s that heart that makes Champions better than expected, a shaggy underdog story that might be a bit overlong and a bit awkward in places, but with charming characters that help smooth out these rough edges. In doing so, Bobby Farrelly sticks to his comedic sensibilities, creating an endearing comedy that doesn’t need to break from the formula of similar films that have come before.

Rating: B-

Champions comes to theaters on March 10.