Overall Rating
 Awesome: 31.73%
Worth A Look: 50.96%
Average: 13.46%
Pretty Bad: 2.88%
Total Crap: 0.96%
9 reviews, 50 user ratings
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| Friday Night Lights |
by Loey Lockerby
"Praying at the pigskin altar"
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I’ve always contended that sports movies are just chick flicks for guys. They’re designed to push the same emotional buttons that weepy “relationship” dramas hit, only they do it with megadoses of testosterone. “Friday Night Lights” isn’t just a sports movie. It's a high school football movie. Based on a true story. Set in Texas. Gentlemen, start your Kleenex.Billy Bob Thornton plays the standard tough-but-caring coach, Gary Gaines, whose job it is to lead the Odessa-Permian team to the state championships. This is not, of course, simply a job – it’s this man’s life, and the life of the whole town. Gaines has a good team, but not a great one, and he depends too much on the star running back, James “Boobie” Miles (Derek Luke), an arrogant hotshot whose bravado masks the fact that he literally can’t do anything but play football (he can barely even read). When Boobie blows his knee out, the remaining team members have to compensate. It’s not a pretty sight.
It does provide a chance for director Peter Berg (“The Rundown”) to explore the lives of a couple of other players, most notably Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), a kid with a lot of potential but little self-confidence, and Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), who gets beat up by his alcoholic father (country singer Tim McGraw) every time he fumbles a ball.
As you may have guessed, there's some fairly dark material in "Friday Night Lights," which automatically sets it apart from your average rah-rah sports flick. Berg allows the nastiest, most unpleasant aspects of Texas high school athletics to rear their heads, and his cast is more than up to the challenge of making it all seem real. It’s no surprise to see great work from Thornton, Luke, or Black, but even McGraw gives a top-notch performance, and I hereby forgive him for “Indian Outlaw.”
Berg keeps pulling back, though. The book the movie's based on, by Berg's cousin, H.G. Bissinger, contains some harsh criticisms of the near-psychotic obsession Texans seem to have with their kids' sports achievements, but Berg barely skims over these issues. There are shots of the impoverished town followed by aerial views of its gleaming, multi-million dollar stadium. There are joking references to the fact that the school spends more money on sports than education. There is one scene in which Don’s father laments that his own life was determined by his success on the playing field (which leads, naturally, to complete forgiveness and reconciliation, no questions asked).
The problem here is that Berg, for all his surface edginess, is a very conventional director, and he seems afraid to be too critical. He’s willing to acknowledge the abyss, but he won’t look into it for long.Everything is dealt with on a superficial level, as if questioning fanatical devotion to sports were tantamount to telling someone their religion is a sham. Which, if you think about it, it probably is.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10978&reviewer=380
originally posted: 10/12/04 02:30:50
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USA
08-Oct-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 18-Jan-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
10-Mar-2005
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