Bobby Farrelly's "Champions," is based on the 2018 Spanish film "Campeones.” It follows the fundamental pattern of every other motivational sports film about a hangdog coach in need of redemption. The cringe-worthy part is that it utterly ignores the humanity of its squad of disabled basketball players and uses them only as a means of attaining this redemption.

Marcus is played by Woody Harrelson. He starts out the movie being cocky, aggressive, and every other stereotype you'd anticipate for this kind of character. Even with the distinctive charm that Harrelson gives to every role, it's difficult to understand why we should spend two hours watching this. His one-night stand-turned-lover Alex (Kaitlin Olson) isn't much better when it comes to character development. She says awful things like "I'm a woman over 40. ” But happily, Olson gives her performance a few more nuances than the character is shown on the written page.

“I’m sorry, I’m new to this,” Marcus says to Alex after making a significant gaffe asking how her brother Johnny (Kevin Iannucci) got his intellectual disability. To which she has to explain he was born with Down Syndrome, you don’t catch it. That’s the film's main presumption: everyone watching it is new to knowing anything about intellectual disabilities. Therefore it’s continually explaining their existence rather than allowing them to exist.

The recreation facility manager Julio (Cheech Marin) previously revealed the team's private lives to Marcus. We witness brief glimpses of their employment and houses as his speech is spoken over. The filmmakers, however, never bothered to really spend any time with these folks as they went about their daily lives. Instead, they present the spectator with a distant, almost anthropological view of their lives. They are not complex people worth spending real time with, according to the producers. The producers seem to only perceive them as instructional resources for Marcus and the audience.

But the plot devotes a lot of screen time to the developing romance between Marcus and Alex. We see things go from straight intercourse to dinners out to Marcus witnessing Alex play Shakespeare at work. And obviously, Marcus coming over to her and Johnny's house for their mother's cheesy meatloaf Monday.

Every character has an arc. Most of them are related to getting to the Special Olympics North American Regional Championship.

When the team finally makes it to Winnipeg for the championship, they are, of course, trailing going into halftime. Marcus delivers the expected motivational locker room speech. Because of all the "stuff they put up with from ignorant people every day," Marcus tells them they are already champions. Despite the film's best efforts, this scene makes this feisty group into tokens and is possibly the most cringe-worthy in the entire movie.

When lead coach Phil (Ernie Hudson) fires Marcus from his assistant coaching position at the start of "Champions," he tells him he needs to get to know the players on more than just a professional level. The same is true for the filmmakers, who must extend the Friends the same grace and recognize their full humanity.