Champions (2023)

Bobby Farrelly steps out alone for the first time in decades, having spent a career sharing the directing credit with his brother, and delivers an English-language remake of a Spanish film about a surly basketball coach sentenced to shepherd a Special Olympics team. Woody Harrelson plays Marcus Marakovich, a man of limited emotional vocabulary and unlimited temper, who crashes his car while drunk and picks community service over jail. The rec center is underfunded. The players are earnest. The redemption arc is visible from the parking lot.

The film's most substantive decision lives in its casting. Farrelly stocked the roster of the Friends with actors who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, Madison Tevlin and Joshua Felder and Kevin Iannucci among them, and this is not set dressing. Neurodivergence is the engine of the whole picture, its subject and its structure and its better punchlines. That choice earns the movie genuine credit and also marks its ceiling, because the story still orbits the able-bodied man. The players exist to teach him to feel. Kaitlin Olson's Alex is present to be a sister and a girlfriend, and the screenplay asks nothing further of her.

What remains is an amiable, soft-edged sermon on dignity, delivered through montage and a climactic loss that everyone agrees to call a victory. The earnestness is real and almost never complicated, and more than a few critics found it sliding into condescension. A subplot about the rec center's finances gestures at institutional neglect without naming anyone responsible. The film wants to be kind, and mostly is, in the manner of a greeting card drafted by a committee that could not agree on the message. The intentions are honorable. The uplift is relentless. By the closing credits, a viewer may feel less moved than gently managed.