★★★

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.