NET GAINS

Opening this weekend:

Champions--Just like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, Woody Harrelson is a hotheaded basketball coach who loses jobs over violent outbursts on the court. Just like Keanu Reeves in Hardball, he has a coaching gig forced on him, in this case as community service in lieu of jail time. In short, Champions follows the standard sports movie playbook plot point for plot point. The variation, this time, is that Harrelson is assigned to a Special Olympics team made up of players with intellectual disabilities.

Thus the obvious worry, going in, is that these characters will be either ridiculed or patronized, or both. The director is Bobby Farrelly, half of the Farrelly Brothers, who in earlier films have indeed derived broad comedy from intellectually disabled characters; his brother Peter Farrelly, who we saw advising the filmmakers with Down syndrome in the documentary Sam and Mattie Make a Zombie Movie, insists that they "revere" such people but refuse to sentimentalize or condescend in their depictions of them.

How does this approach work out in Champions? Well, certainly the quirks and limitations of Harrelson's ballers are played for laughs, but I think no more insultingly than in, say, The Mighty Ducks or Dodgeball or, for that matter, Major League, or any other formula sports flick about the triumph of a ragtag bunch of misfit underdogs.

It helps, too, that the coach is generally the butt of the jokes. More importantly, the actors who play the team members are spirited, ebullient, confident performers with vivid personalities. They also bring out the best in Harrelson, who responds to them with what appears to be genuine warmth and delight.

Aside from the charming engagement between these actors and the star, the movie, set in Des Moines but mostly filmed in Canada, is pretty by-the-numbers, though it's pleasant and watchable (it's a knockoff, by the way, of a 2018 Spanish film called Campeones, a hit in that country). Ernie Hudson and Cheech Marin turn up in supporting roles but have little to do. Harrelson's love interest is Kaitlin Olson as a small-potatoes Shakespearean actor and the protective sister of one of the players, and the bantering dialogue Mark Rizzo provides for them isn't a disgrace. And I'm predisposed to like any movie in which the climax of The Winter's Tale is used to teach the pick-and-roll.

NYUKLEHEADS

Though they were on TV all the time, The Three Stooges shorts were never favorites of mine when I was a kid. There was something oppressive about the drab, monochrome world they inhabited. The constant, daunting work, for which they were ill-suited and at which they were existentially fated to fail, the incessant, tedious beatings, and browbeatings, of the mild by the aggressive—it was, perhaps, a little too much like school for my taste.

It was only as an “adult” that I came to appreciate the skill, precision and occasional anarchy of the Stooges at their best. Sometime in the ‘80s I saw 1940’s A-Plumbing We Will Go at a theatre, tacked onto the bill of some feature, and suddenly the slapstick, with its tinge of surrealism, was hilarious, and the characterizations unsentimental and brilliant.

Whether or not they’re your cup of tea, the Stooges are show-business history—their enduring, now iconic popularity is a direct link to vaudeville, and a testament to the indestructibility of that style. Now the Farrelly Brothers have made it to the multiplexes with their long-delayed feature film The Three Stooges, an unironic attempt to re-create the act’s best-loved vintage for a modern audience.

In various combinations, the Stooges were popular in the theatre from the mid-‘20s. They were in movies from the early ‘30s, first at Fox and MGM, often in support of their old vaudeville top banana Ted Healy, and then on their own at Columbia in a series of relentlessly cranked-out, insanely profitable short subjects, and into the ‘60s on TV and in a string of mostly dismal features. But it was the first Columbia line-up—Moe Howard as the mean, morose alpha male, bossing around frizzy-haired, soft-spoken Larry Fine and Jerome “Curly” Howard as the manic, childlike wild card—that have proved pop-culture immortals.

In the Farrellys’ Three Stooges, after early scenes depicting the trio as boys in an orphanage, the gifted Sean Hayes, here top-billed, plays Larry, while stage and TV journeyman Chris Diamantopolous plays Moe and sketch-comedy vet Will Sasso plays Curly. The story, strung across three episodes—each with its own “Three Blind Mice” title sequence—is a standard raising-money-to-save-the-orphanage pretext, basically the same used in The Blues Brothers. It allows for episodes at a zoo, a hospital, a fancy party, and on the set of Jersey Shore. Eventually, the boys are duped into a murder plot.

It’s a perfectly acceptable, loose approach, but obviously there’s only one really relevant question—is it funny? Well, part of me wishes I could honestly say that this movie didn’t make me laugh, not because I’m ashamed of liking lowbrow humor, but because I’d almost prefer if the Stooges’ comedy was irrecoverable, except from the original films.

But this movie did make me laugh, much more than I expected it to, and I wasn’t laughing alone at the screening. There’s no question that it’s ersatz; while the leads are impressive—Hayes even manages to bring a nice touch of delicacy to some of his line readings—no one would mistake their polished impressions for the hardscrabble authenticity of the real Stooges. Yet somehow this doesn’t matter. The routines work anyway, just like they did in the later movies with Shemp and Joe Besser and “Curly Joe” DeRita, just like they did onstage before Curly joined the act. Without Curly they aren’t magical, and neither is the new film, but these shticks were built to last, and they still get their laughs honestly.

It should also be said that there are other strong performances in the film, notably by Larry David, in nun drag as the venomous “Sister Mary Mengele,” and by Sofia Vergara as a villainous femme fatale—her horrified mugging every time the Stooges make another inopportune reappearance is pretty amusing.

Finally, the now-obligatory “Kids, don’t try this at home” disclaimer at the end is cleverly handled.