There’s absurdity in the capacity of a film like 80 for Brady to boast three Oscar winners and a near-miss nominee as its leading quartet. A vague sense that something has gone rather awry in tinsel town. Is this the best available to such talent? From debutant director Kyle Marvin and two the writers of Booksmart – Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern – this one is rote grey pound farce. Think Girls Trip meets Book Club by way of The Blind Side. An ungodly mix if ever one were. What’s more, as produced by NFL legend Tom Brady, it’s a blatant vanity project. And based on a true story don’t cha know?
Love bleeds into life through a dreamy Brixton haze in Raine Allen-Miller’s Rye Lane, which must be far and away the best British romcom in some time. It’s a vibrant, audacious affair, thrumming with colour and exciting diversity of beats. Right from the off, via an aerial flight over a row of unisex lavatories, Rye Lane revels in its own strange and alluring beauty. The experience is all encompassing, a rush of overwhelming sensory engagement, but thoroughly intimate. It’s the sort of closeness that comes only when a film feels something of the love its story tells.
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.
The Film Blog 