Cinema - Champions : a thoroughly predictable but rather lovely film

Champions is everything you imagine it is going to be, a thoroughly predictable but rather lovely film which raps you up in its message of empowerment and ticks all the right boxes.

You never feel you don’t know where it’s going, but maybe that’s part of its charm – an undemanding spectacle which hammers its right-on lessons without being over-preachy. It’s a film about second chances, a film about forgiving, a film about not judging by first impressions, about challenging your own and everyone else’s expectations and ultimately about what it actually means to be a champion. The key thing, of course, is that it’s not necessarily about winning in the conventional sense.

Part of the film’s air of predictability is that the trailer has been doing the rounds for so long and it’s one of those annoying trailers which gives away too much, leaving the film seeming at times to be little more than the expanded version. And over-expanded at that. It really doesn’t warrant the two-hours-plus running time.

But if you niggle at a film as wholesome as this one, you’ll soon feel a bit of a heel. The whole thing – even if it outstays its welcome by maybe ten to 15 minutes – is thoroughly likeable; woke without being smug; virtuous without being dull.

The gist is that Woody Harrelson is Marcus, a bad boy former minor-league basketball coach who, after biffing his boss and then drunkenly smashing his car into a police car, gets ordered to do 90 days community service with a team of players with intellectual disabilities.

Yep, you know where it’s going. Slowly but surely he moulds his disparate charges into a team and slowly but surely they show him that actually he has got a soul in there somewhere after all. The woman he has treated shabbily turns out to be the sister of one of the players, and so there is a second chance there as well.

It’s a winning performance from Harrelson who persuasively shows us a man being transformed by all the things he would never have considered important; and it’s an even better performance by the varied members of his team, each quirky and individual, each with their own obsessions and challenges, but each warm and open-hearted. All of them, in their own way, put coach Marcus back on the right track – a path to redemption and basically readmission into the ranks of decent folk once again.

So what will he do when a big job comes knocking at his door? And just how far can his team go as they start to pick up victory after victory? In the end, it’s about kindness and understanding; and it’s about forgiveness too – and that’s what gives the film its appeal. Kaitlin Olson is excellent as the girlfriend/sister who makes Marcus rethink. Lovely too from Madison Tevlin as Cosentino; Joshua Felder as Darius; Kevin Iannucci as Johnny; Ashton Gunning as Cody; Matthew Von Der Ahe as Craig; Tom Sinclair as Blair; James Day Keith as Benny; Alex Hintz as Arthur; and Casey Metcalfe as Marlon.