Champions

Inspiring sports film that follows the formula of the trainer with problems that grows as a person next to his team that also has problems. If the formula works do not break it, and here it works for a good time in the movies with mom. The colorful characters that make up this basketball team are those who maintain this film with their charisma, as well as the initial approach to the story, which is attractive and captures attention. However, the plot is going through the path of laziness to resolve their conflicts, until reaching a moment where the main character makes an unethical decision to solve a problem; this makes the outcome anticlimactic. In the epilogue, this character also sins superbly and makes his team do something that he should have done because his life changed thanks to them. This ruins the moral of the story, putting a corny but loose outcome. In short, it is a film of good intentions but that goes from more to less until reaching an unsatisfactory resolution.

Watched as part of institute cervantes festival, thank you

this starts of in a completey differnet direction and doesnt stop ducking and weaving right to the end as have a fabulour hilarious ride along. Its so clever in handleing its theme or several theme that any audience is going to have a hoot. Highly recommend , effective use of the instrument of cinema!

Marco Montes after an heated argument turning into him pushing the head coach, gets drunk and crashes into a police car. His driving license is revoked and to avoid prison, he is offered a community service where he gets to coach intellectually disabled basketball team. This turns his life around as he learns what it feels to be a team and a better human, spending time coaching and even mends his relationship with his wife. Will his team win the championship forms rest of the story.

The film's strength is it's inspiring story and the lovable team from Los Amigos. The performances instantly clicked with me and also Javier Gutierrez as Marco. The screenplay does get convenient in the second half and a couple of scenes do get over dramatic but they can be easily ignored as the story itself is engaging enough till the end. There is a perfect balance between the humor and the dramatic moments. Definitely recommended.

This very amusing film deals with Marco, Javier Gutierrez, is the second coach of an important team in the Basketball league ACB, when at a party he makes a strong discusion, being fired out of the stadium . Later on, a drunk Marco drives his automobile, then he has a car crash against a police car. After that, he is detained, really arrested, judged and condemned. As a judge woman sentences wether 2 years spend in prison or 90 days making community services. There Marco is forced to train a team of botcher mentallity disabled players, they are called Los Amigos or The Friends. And their principal objective : to get create a competent team capable to win the Spanish league . As Marco and his players with the unexpected help of his separated wife Sonia : Athenea Mata , try to win the national campionship and to become themselves the Spanish champions.

This above average charming story packs basketball sports, entertainment, humor, emotion, good feeling and lots of fun. The sympatheic roles and funny script use bewildering incidents to give us an attractive flick and that keeps you entertained for the almost 125 minutes of duration. Following the amusing and hard preparatives of the bungler team formed by naive players and eventually the final competing match, tournament taking place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, though the film was actually shot in Huelva and Madrid . The most part of the film concerns in the elaborate process to train them, including a great number of laughters, myhem and confusion. Main and support cast provide enjoyable intepretations. Real starring is Javier Gutierrez as a trainer seeking redemption, he gives a terrific acting, as usual. Javier has already a long and successful career as cinema : Marshland, The motive or Autor, The olive tree, Plan de Fuga, 1898 los ultimos de Filipinas, Retribution, Truman, Assassin's creed , as TV series : Aguila Roja, Verguenza, Estoy vivo. He is well accompanied by a good support cast as Daniel Freire as a trainer, Luis Bermejo a a seller, Luisa Gavasa as his mother and Juan Margallo who long time ago he played the fugitive man in the classic Espiritu de la Colmena. Along with a fine plethora of secondaries, actually mentally disabled, such as : Jose Luna, Gloria Ramos, Sergio Olivo, Carrascosa, Julio Fernandez and special mention for Jesús Vidal who won Goya award as best newcomer secondary actor.

Being well financed by two important producers : Gabriel Arias Salgado and Alvaro Longoria. The motion picture was competently written and directed by Javier Fesser. He is a comedy and humor expert who has written and directed a few fims and shorts, such as : Mortadelo and Filemon contra Jimmy el cachondo or mission implausible, The big adventure of Mortadelo and Filemon, Candida, Camino, The miracle of P. Tinto. And shorts as Invictus, Bienvenidos and 17 year together. Rating 7.5/10. Better than average. Well worth watching. Fun for the whole family.

This tender and beautifully made movie is quite obvious and predictable. But it is worth to sacrifice originality when your goal is to focus in the moral message. And this movie has a strong an powerful moral message, so overwhelming that it makes you feel almost like in a church listening a sermon of an old and good hearted priest. It is like 2 hours of visual Aesop greek fables where the characters, instead of animals, are archetypical humans. The most important critic is to our own Spanish history: the National Basketball team cheated in the Paralympic Games of Sydney 2000, because 10 out of 12 of our basketball players did not have any mental disability. They won the gold medal, but they had to return it afterwards. Also the film showcases the extraordinary negative consequences of hyper protective parenthood in raising narcissistic people, completely immature in their 30s an 40s to the point that they can not endure the risks and challenges of sustaining a relationship, facing rejection or creating a family. Specially consistent during the whole film is the critic to our society, based in success over experience, performance over playfulness, fitness over kindness, dominance over community. Finally, the most subtle but powerful subversive message in the movie is questioning to which extent are sick and poisoned the people that consider ourselves "normal". Much of our "normality" might be counter productive, to the point to make us too rigid, cold hearted and stressed because of our own insane standards. All the special basketball players of this special team show us that most of the times it's ok to look silly, to do something stupid or to fail constantly, because they still have each other. So many of us can not say the same.

This movie is such a nice, entertaining, sweet and tender way of reflecting about all these moral values. It's been selected to compete for the Oscar to the best foreign film, but honestly I think they have no chance. We are still too much into an Instagram Age to take a movie like this one seriously.