Combine That Championship Season, Jason Miller's 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning play about a group of men held together in adult life through the malign influence of their high-school basketball coach, and Alan Alda's popular 1981 movie Four Seasons, in which some emotionally arrested middle-class chums and their wives spend their vacations in one another's company, and then drain the result of wit and insight. The result would be this terrible comedy in which the five 12-year-old boys who played on a middle-school New England basketball team in 1978 are reunited 30 years later for their coach's funeral and a 4 July weekend at a lakeside resort to scatter his ashes and to bond and reconsider their lives.

They're a dislikable bunch, constantly scoring off one another, learning little about themselves. Their wives and children are little more appealing. The jokes, mostly involving pain, farting, urination, leering, humiliation, are distasteful and sentimentality lurks everywhere. The movie is about as feelgood as being invited to the Mad Hatter's tea party and discovering that the guests of honour are Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.