Comedy
Champions (12A)
Review: Thirty years after Woody Harrelson hustled on a basketball court in White Men Can’t Jump, the Texas-born actor shoots hoops and scores generous laughs in director Bobby Farrelly’s English language remake of the award-winning 2018 Spanish sports comedy Campeones. Screenwriter Mark Rizzo retains the dramatic arc of the original to challenge discriminatory attitudes head-on but relocates the heartwarming sentiment to snow-laden Iowa replete with an exuberant supporting cast, many of whom make their feature film debuts. Chumbawamba’s rabble-rousing 1997 anthem Tubthumping, with its defiant chorus (“I get knocked down but I get up again/You’re never gonna keep me down!”), is a fitting musical motif for this empowering sermon about never judging a person by perceived physical or intellectual limitations.
Characters in Rizzo’s script prove doubters wrong, often accompanied by a zinging one-liner. Harrelson trades on his inherent charm to traverse a predictable path from brash, politically incorrect knucklehead to passionate ally, sparking molten screen chemistry with Kaitlin Olson as a spunky love interest who refuses to let any man have the last word or dictate her destiny. Unquestionably, she is one of the film’s MVPs along with scene stealer Madison Tevlin as the team’s sole female player, who is asked to assess the attractiveness of Harrelson’s coach. “You’re no McConaughey,” she sassily responds. Slam dunk.
Minor league basketball coach Marcus Marakovich (Harrelson) dreams of promotion to the NBA but his lofty ambitions are dealt a blow when he is fired from the Iowa Stallions after an altercation with head coach Phil Peretti (Ernie Hudson). Soon after, Marcus drives home under the influence of alcohol and collides with a stationary police car. Judge Menendez (Alexandra Castillo) sentences him to 90 days’ community service teaching basketball to adults with intellectual disabilities at the Capitol East Recreation Centre managed by Julio (Cheech Marin).
Marcus is painfully close-minded and intolerant of a ragtag team comprising Arthur (Alex Hintz), Darius (Joshua Felder), Blair (Tom Sinclair), Benny (James Day Keith), Cody (Ashton Gunning), Cosentino (Madison Tevlin), Craig (Matthew von der Ahe), Johnny (Kevin Iannucci), Marlon (Casey Metcalfe), Showtime (Bradley Edens) and Sonny (Matt Cook). The players gradually coalesce and Johnny introduces coach to his actress sister Alex (Olson), who turns out to be the one-night stand that recently exited Marcus’s bedroom with the pithy parting words, “You were fun… and sometimes that’s all a woman can wish for.” Three-pointer.
Champions is an unabashed crowd pleaser with a strong central message of equality and inclusivity that always bears repeating. Harrelson is the butt of jokes while his fallen hero acquires some long overdue learning about empathy and understanding and the tone noticeably sweetens as his neanderthal evolves into a mouthpiece for participation without prejudice. Farrelly double dribbles between humour and heart-tugging emotion, pandering to genre tropes without divorcing himself entirely from reality.
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Horror
Scream VI (18)
Review: The f word is used liberally and loudly in directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s sequel to the requel of Wes Craven’s self-referential 1996 slasher. Not the expletive, although swearing is plentiful as Ghostface runs amok in New York City at Halloween with a knife and shotgun. The buzzword is ‘franchise’, that neat summation of a six-film series (thus far) with more than 700 million dollars in global box office takings. Scriptwriters James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick gleefully foreshadow carnage with a trademark monologue that explains the sleek architecture of a franchise: successive entries usually have bigger budgets, higher death counts, and no one is safe, certainly not the legacy characters.
Scream VI delivers on each signposted promise and conceals the identity of Ghostface in plain sight, but familiarity with previous instalments and well-worn genre tropes breed predictability. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s picture doesn’t tee up any jump scares or heart in mouth shocks and two hours of brutal, relentless violence is numbing, especially when Ghostface insists on stabbing some victims several times in a frenzy, the camera lingering on the wound site. A year after terror returned to the Californian town of Woodsboro, high school student Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega), older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) and twins Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) have relocated to the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple, foolishly believing the nightmare is behind them.
Tara, Sam and Chad are enrolled at Blackmore University while Sam is reluctantly seeking help from a therapist but refusing to unpack her trauma. A new Ghostface strikes in the teeming metropolis, where online romance can right-swipe bloodshed and no one rallies to a neighbour’s blood-curdling cries for help.
Mindy’s girlfriend Anika (Devyn Nekoda), Chad’s dorky dormmate Ethan (Jack Champion) and Tara’s sex-positive roommate Quinn (Liana Liberato) are drawn into the bedlam as TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) angles for an exclusive interview and Quinn’s father, Detective Bailey (Dermot Mulroney), pinpoints his prime suspect. The plot thickens and fellow Woodsboro survivor Kirby Reed (Hayden Panettiere) returns to face her knife-wielding demon.
Scream VI confidently orchestrates a deadly game of cat and mice in apartment blocks, on city streets and the subway, harking back to earlier chapters to expand and distort the series’ blood-soaked mythology. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett delight in plunging blades into almost every member of the cast while Barrera and Ortega strengthen their sisterly bond with touching scenes in the face of chilling adversity. The script pointedly denies certain characters their constitutional right to bear arms and prematurely end Ghostface’s reign of terror, guaranteeing a risible number of bodies tagged and bagged in New York’s mortuaries.
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