I was looking forward to this movie for a number of reasons. I grew up playing basketball and Woody Harrelson has done two basketball films I enjoyed (White Men Can’t Jump, Semi-Pro). And the Farrelly brothers made a lot of great comedies (There’s Something About Mary, Kingpin [with Harrelson], Stuck on You [which cast a few actors with disabilities], Dumb and Dumber). When the Farrelly brothers split, Peter gave us the terrific Green Book. And Bobby gave us this.
Since I was a volunteer basketball coach for a Special Olympics team for five years, I didn’t want to take any of my biases into the screening. Yet a lot of the basketball games and practices happened exactly as they were shown on screen.
Harrelson plays an assistant basketball coach in the G League (a minor league for the NBA). He has a bad day when he pushes the head coach (Ernie Hudson) to the ground during an argument. The story makes it all over the news, and after drinking in a bar that night, he ends up hitting a parked cop car. The judge gives him a choice – a year and a half in prison or 90 days coaching a team of players with mental disabilities (that doesn’t seem like a very difficult choice).
The movie has a problem the Farrellys have faced before. It may have its heart in the right place, but he’s making jokes that have us laughing at these players (although in his defense, most of the jokes are at the coach’s expense). And something that shocked my wife and I, was how graphic a lot of the players were when talking about sex. It gets it a PG-13 rating, and something you can’t bring the whole family to because of those scenes. A few of those jokes worked and were tame, but just a tad risque. For example, the player finding out his sister is sleeping with the coach. He indignantly asks, “Are you doing sex moves with her?”
That’s cute. But some of the things…just makes you cringe that these players are being sexualized.
Another problem the movie has is Woody Harrelson. Part of it could be that I’m sick of seeing him in three movies a year. The other part is he just seemed a bit too creepy. He’s bringing baggage to this role, that makes you never really buy the transformation he’s supposed to make when he really starts caring for these players. The dialogue/script works for what he’s saying and doing that does show us he cares, it’s just Harrelson delivering those lines. Although, as a former coach of a team like this, it surprised me that he didn’t quickly realize it’s not coaching with X’s and O’s, and running plays, as much as just teaching them the basic fundamentals, watching as they forget most of those once they get on the court, babysitting, and cheering them on no matter what they’re doing out there. It’s shown in the film perfectly when we see a female coach on the other team being so positive. Again, it makes you dislike Harrelson’s character because he’s either a jerk, or he’s really clueless. This isn’t like Hoosiers, where the coach may have gone from college to a small hick town in Indiana to coach a high school team, but can still teach the kids plays and life lessons.
The grouchy coach changing will remind older folks of Bad News Bears and A League of Their Own (both films that are 100 times better). I thought of a movie the Farrelly brothers produced almost 20 years ago – The Ringer, where Johnny Knoxville pretends to be mentally challenged for a Special Olympics team to pick up on a woman. A few years after The Ringer was Role Models, where similar to the premise here, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott got DUIs and a judge ordered them to work as “big brothers.” (This movie is more on par with those films)
Cheech Marin is wasted here (not “wasted” the way he is when he’s with Chong), playing a character who works at the rec center where the team practices, and often has exposition dialogue or subtle words of wisdom.
The relationship the coach has with a player’s sister (Kaitlin Olson of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), is a bit odd, but once they start to become more than just a casual hook-up but an actual relationship, they have chemistry together. It’s rather touching when she explains to him why she kept him at arm's length, and there are a few other scenes that almost make you shed a tear.
Matt Cook, who was good in Peter Farrelly’s underrated The Greatest Beer Run Ever, plays a character that makes absolutely no sense. We’re not sure what kind of relationship he’s interested in having with the coach, and it feels like a character you’d see in a sitcom. He keeps promising the coach he’ll get him a position coaching in the NBA (it was a lot more fun watching Adam Sandler last year, trying to get a coaching position in The Hustler).
I’m being generous giving this 2 stars out of 5. It gets a star for introducing me to something that can go along with “Taco Tuesday” – Meatloaf Monday; and also for watching a player poorly sing the Pina Colada Song on a bus to a game.