You’ll root for coach Woody – but a slam dunk it ain’t: BRIAN VINER views Champions
Champions (12A, 123 min)
Verdict: Score points
Scream VI (18, 123 minutes)
Classification: 
Verdict: terrifyingly formulated
The Spanish film Campeones was a huge critical and commercial success when it was released five years ago. Inspired by real events in Valencia, it told the story of a disgraced basketball coach who, after being convicted of driving under the influence, was ordered to do community service by taking charge of a team of players with intellectual disabilities.
An English version seemed like only a matter of time, and here it is: set in Des Moines, Iowa with Woody Harrelson as an assistant coach for a minor league basketball team, the Iowa Stallions.
I saw Champions at a gala screening on Wednesday in aid of the charity Mencap, in an audience made up mainly of people with learning disabilities and others. The movie received a lot of love from them, so I’m not inclined to criticize it.
Directed by Bobby Farrelly in his first directorial outing away from his brother Peter (with whom he made the 1994 hit Dumb and Dumber), it’s a modest crowd pleaser. But from where he was sitting, he lays down a series of emotional shots without scoring any of them.
At first, Marcus (Harrelson) is a world-weary guy who thinks he’s training far below his level and vents his frustration by getting into a fight on the pitch and then driving drunk. He is arrested and duly fired by the Stallions.
Woody Harrelson plays the assistant coach of a minor league basketball team, the Iowa Stallions.
A judge orders Marcus (Harrelson) to spend three months training The Friends, a team made up of young people with Down syndrome, degrees of autism and other special needs.
Soon, a judge orders him to spend three months training The Friends, a team made up of young people with Down syndrome, degrees of autism, and other special needs.
There are echoes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which coincidentally also had a memorable basketball scene; and even, as Marcus’s ability with his charges makes her rethink his professional future, from To Sir, With Love (1967).
There’s nothing wrong with cinematic echoes like that. But Mark Rizzo’s script is a bit mediocre, and the dramatic conflicts that this kind of story requires, to make the main character’s inevitable redemption all the more satisfying, feel concocted.
Unlike his counterpart in the Spanish film, Marcus has no wildly offensive biases that need to be corrected, just a predilection for ‘the R word’ and some misunderstandings about Down syndrome, which he quickly clears up.
A subplot, with Marcus trying to get one of his old Stallions colleagues to pull the strings and get him a job on a top team, is especially weak.
Still, there’s a compelling romance with Alex (a charming performance by Kaitlin Olson), stemming from an inauspicious one-night stand and further complicated when she turns out to be the sister of one of Marcus’s players, Johnny (Kevin Iannucci). . .
And Harrelson, as always, is an engaging screen presence. Champions is about as formulaic as a movie can be, but it certainly doesn’t lack for heart.
Scream VI is another formula-based exercise: the latest in the so-called ‘slasher franchise’ that started in 1996.
Like the series’ previous image, last year’s Scream, it strives to have its cake and stab it, parodying the slasher genre (most notably by overtly referencing Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday The 13th, and Psycho) while strictly abiding their conventions. , as a killer in a ghoulish ghost mask once again terrorizes the long-suffering Carpenter sisters, Samantha (Melissa Barrera) and Tara (Jenna Ortega).
Like the previous image in the series, last year’s Scream, Scream VI strives to have its cake and stab at it, parodying the slasher genre.
Courteney Cox reprises her role as TV host Gale Weathers, who ends up fighting the terrifying masked psychopath.
As these things go, it is done skillfully and intelligently. Courteney Cox reprises her role as TV host Gale Weathers, who ends up battling the terrifying masked psychopath in a trendy Manhattan apartment. . . just to put Monica to bed on Friends once and for all.
I was also quite surprised to enjoy a scene (and this doesn’t give anything away, since it all happens even before the opening titles) where an associate professor of film studies, lecturing on creepy movies, is lured into a dark alley. and hideously sent. Still, it could have been worse.
It could have been a criticism.