Mark Reviews Movies: NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 9, 2021

There's an interesting conversation—and a better argument—at the heart of National Champions, a fictionalized drama about the business, politics, and financial interests of college sports. Whether or not the movie actually names the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is irrelevant (The actors kind of jumble or casually toss out the abbreviation to such a degree that it's difficult to tell in the moment or recall in retrospect). We know exactly of what these characters speak and, in a series of back-room scenes of conspiracy, whom they more or less represent.

The conversation of Adam Mervis' screenplay, which takes place over the course of a 73-hour cycle of organizing and spin and media coverage, is between the labor rights of student athletes and the notion that, as students first, these athletes are compensated by scholarships, room and board, and the funding the NCAA or its equivalent here gives to college athletic programs. Since this dramatized case is presented as a dialogue, there's no real winner to be found by the movie's end, which, admirably, features not a single scene of football, save for an opening promo for the championship game that's about to occur.

There's no Big Game here—just a lot of big talk, big speeches, and big conflicts of ego, idealism, pragmatism, corruption, and some increasingly distracting personal melodrama. Mervis could have cheated and found a way to arrive at some formulaic climax, but unlike the movie's ultimate position on the debate at the center of the movie, the filmmakers stand by their convictions in terms of the plot.

As for the central conflict, it's between LeMarcus James (Stephan James), the star quarterback—with an almost-guaranteed contract for multiple millions of dollars in the professional league in the upcoming draft—for one of the final teams, and pretty much everyone else. Along with fellow player and friend Emmett Sunday (Alexander Ludwig), LeMarcus, who has taken an introductory class to labor rights this year, has decided to boycott the championship game. Hiding away from his teammates and the coaching staff, he announces his decision on social media, gives a few interviews, and starts recruiting players on both teams to join him.

On the other side, we meet a bunch of people who want to put a stop to LeMarcus' activism. Head coach James Lazor (J.K. Simmons), a long-timer who has never had an opportunity to bring a team to such a big stage, cares about the upcoming game and his legacy, which leads to a generic Big Speech to the remaining players about seizing the glory of the moment. He also cares about LeMarcus, of course, and enough so that he's hiding a big secret about the quarterback, his older half-brother, and Emmett—one that gradually overtakes and overshadows the real conversation Mervis and director Ric Roman Waugh want to have about the state of college athletics.

Another such subplot involves the coach's put-upon wife (played by Kristin Chenoweth) and her lover Elliott (Timothy Olyphant), whose presence in New Orleans for the game is kept as a surprise for the third act. The revelation at least explains why the movie spends so much time with him, although the context of the affair doesn't match the rest of the story's stakes.

Meanwhile, the athletic association's head (played by Jeffrey Donovan) works to keep the game on schedule and to undermine LeMarcus' image to the public, enlisting a seemingly ruthless attorney (played by Uzo Aduba) to dig up as much dirt as she can on the star. Mervis gives her, a former college athlete, yet another Big Speech to make the case for the association, what it does with its billions of dollars in budget, and how those efforts help student athletes in college and beyond.

It's a fine enough diatribe, if one believes there is a legitimate debate to be had here. That's difficult to buy, considering the movie's own assertions: that the association spends a lot of its budget on administrative costs, that the higher-ups would go to such despicable lengths to maintain their bottom line, that the coaching staff is paid way too much to convince athletes to play for free, and that the players are left ill-prepared for the real world outside of sports and/or with debilitating injuries, for which neither the association nor the school will take responsibility.

As much as the movie tries to add complications to LeMarcus' personal life (There's the cover-up, involving an incident at a bar, as well as the fact that he passed COVID-19 to his teammates), there's little escaping that the character makes the best, soundest, and most morally convincing arguments in this conversation. Some of the coaching staff (including characters played by Lil Rel Howery and Tim Blake Nelson) agree with LeMarcus and even the head coach is sympathetic, but when it comes time for the filmmakers to take a decisive stand, all of the secrets and interpersonal conflicts have become the central focus. In other words, National Champions, for lack of a better term, punts.

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