124 min | PG-13 | March 10, 2023 | Focus Features
A washed-up coach drives drunk into a cop car and a judge hands him a sentence. Ninety days coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities. He needs them more than they need him, and the movie already knows it.
Marcus is a minor-league basketball coach who gets fired, gets drunk, and crashes his car into a police cruiser. The judge gives him a choice. Jail or ninety days coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities at a community rec center. He takes the deal because he has no other option, and the film knows exactly where this goes from the first frame. Bobby Farrelly builds a redemption story where the abrasive professional learns humility from the people he was hired to manage, and the destination is visible from the starting line.
Woody Harrelson plays Marcus as a man whose talent curdled into resentment years ago. He delivers the early contempt with a slouch and a permanent half-sneer, and he softens on a predictable schedule. Kaitlin Olson plays Alex with a flinty refusal to be charmed, and her scenes with Harrelson generate the only friction the script allows. The actual players carry the film. Madison Tevlin plays Cosentino with a comic timing that cuts through the sentiment, and Joshua Felder plays Darius with a guardedness that the screenplay actually earns. Cheech Marin plays Julio, the rec center director, as the patient conscience the story needs.
Farrelly directs alone here after decades of co-directing with his brother, and the broad slapstick instinct shows in the staging of the games. Mark Rizzo adapts a Spanish film, and the script telegraphs every beat with a montage and a needle drop. The basketball sequences cut on the easy laugh rather than on the rhythm of the play, and the editing flattens the games into a highlight reel of pratfalls and buzzer-beaters. The production design keeps everything bright and rounded, the gym lit like a sitcom set. The score swells on cue to tell you when to feel something.
The film treats its players with affection and casts actors with intellectual disabilities in the roles, which is the right call and the most honest thing on screen. The problem is the frame around them. Their lives exist to teach Marcus a lesson, and the camera keeps returning to Harrelson’s face to register his growth. The performers are sharp enough to suggest a better movie about them rather than about the man assigned to fix them. Farrelly settles for the uplift instead of the people, and the uplift arrives exactly on time.