The Collegio Pittsburg's student voice since 1916
Himika Akram reporter
I had low expectations from the director Bobby Farrelly’s movie “Champions” because of the overboard edgy comedy quotient in his movies. Such as “There’s Something About Mary” or “Kingpin.” And this movie too, was not an exception. But without that, this movie is worth watching because of the remarkable story.
Basketball coach Marcus Marakovich consecutively has done 3 wrong things; 1. He got into an intense argument with the coach on the field while the game was going on, to which he was the assistant coach. 2. He could not suppress his anger and frustration; he shoved that coach to the ground. And lastly, 3. Drunk driving on the same day. So, at the same time, he got fired from his job and criminal charges were pressed against him.
When he appeared in the court, the judge gave him choice, either he needs to spend 18 months in jail, or he can choose 3 months of community service where he must coach a team for intellectually disabled people. Obviously, he chooses the second option.
Like any other sports movie, this portion was predictable. When he started coaching the team, he got a team with absolutely no discipline. Some of them are dealing with issues in their family life, some of them has challenging jobs and no time for practice and the most talented one, named Darius refused to be coached by Marcus because he himself was hit by a drunk driver once and he hates them. Marcus is also one of them.
Anyway, Marcus broke the ice with the team people, and this experience gave him a new perspective about life. He realized what he was doing as far as a coach was for himself. To achieve his own success. But he was not compassionate or sympathetic about his team members before. This community service gave him an opportunity to put himself into other people’s shoes and broaden his perspective about other people’s lives. Along with his technical expertise, he now started caring about the people playing for his team. For example, in a scene we see Marcus punching someone on the face because he called his team “retards.”
According to me, it could have been a great movie, if it had not the obscene jokes, too many sexual dialogues and promotion of sexual promiscuity. That part was unnecessary to me and took away a lot from a remarkable story. I am not sure why Bobby does that in every comedy movie of his and spoils the mood of the movie. Words like D**K, F**K, S**T, WH**E,A**, B****ARD were heard like dozens of times and even god’s name was abused for 12 times. There are scenes of drug abuse, profanity, and physical violence as well. Profanity and the sexual content were forced and crass for this story. Even without the inclusion of those, this story would have been loved equally by the audience. But because of this aspect, it became such a movie which nobody would feel comfortable watching with their family. Those added nothing but cheap laughter here. For me, there was no laughter even.
The best part of this movie is it showed how quickly we judge the disabled people thinking they are unable to live without other people’s help. But many of them can lead a normal life, just like anybody of us, and they also can show enormous potential if they meet the correct people. My rate for this movie would have been 7, but because of unnecessary sexual content and jokes, I would take one point away and would rate it as 6/10.