A veritable clutch of genre tropes vie for dominance in Champions, a winning feel gooder from Dumb and Dumber’s Bobby Farrelly. It’s a Dodgeball-esque underdog narrative, a will they/won’t they romance, redemption tale and sports comedy. No path followed here has not many times been well trodden before. That’s not to say the film fails to charm. A script by Mark Rizzo – adapted from Javier Fesser’s Spanish original: Campeones – delivers big on the belly laughs, even as it stumbles through inevitable pitfalls. The heart certainly leaves Champions several notches warmer.
Just four years on from his Star Wars swan song, Adam Driver’s return to intergalactic space hopping is…well, it’s underwhelming. A half baked elevator pitch, cut to the core for the benefit of a palatably brief runtime. The result is a choppy editorial mess. A film laden with seismic holes. That’s even before the ‘catastrophic asteroid’ strikes.
Having traversed L.A., Bruges and Ebbing, Missouri, in his first three films, Martin McDonagh’s fourth finds him on greener soil and can’t help but wear the intimate feel of a homecoming. The Banshees of Inisherin sees the London-born, Galloway-bred director return to at long lost Ireland. Or, rather, to lush island metaphor just off the coastal mainland. Inisherin’s literal meaning is ‘the Ireland island’. This is a desperately sad film, blackly comical and surprisingly tough. With so much to say, McDonaugh’s refusal to rush is a marvel. That his cast excel within the woe is but a bonus.
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