High school football is so important to the entire town of Odessa, TX that mothers quiz their sons about the team playbook during breakfast, star running backs attract a crowd of followers on their morning jog, the coach makes more than the school principal, and more fans show up to watch the team’s first official practice than many other programs draw for real games.
Odessa is also the kind of place where many residents peak in high school, and then can’t help reliving their glory through each new group of boys that don shoulder pads and helmets — making the town a perfect setting for a film about high school football, a point which Friday Night Lights directors Peter Berg and Josh Pate heavy-handedly hammer home.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The 1988 football season is about to get under way, and high expectations surround the Permian Panthers squad. Led by head coach Gary Gaines (played by Billy Bob Thornton), quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), and cocky running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), the Panthers are expected to contend for the 5A state championship — and perhaps even go undefeated along the way.
But in the very first game of the season, the Panthers suffer a major setback: Miles gets drilled behind the line of scrimmage and ends up tearing his ACL, which sidelines him for the rest of the season. Suddenly, the Panthers look a whole lot more vulnerable when the guy they built their offense around isn’t in the backfield anymore.
The film unfolds more like a documentary than a standard feature, with handheld cameras jerkily following first one player, then another, then the coach, then a different player, then a town resident, and back again in short, quick scenes filled with stilted dialog. We go through the rest of the season in this fashion, witnessing Coach Gaines and the Panthers face adversity, pull together, and make it to the title game for a somewhat unforeseen climax.
My Reaction: I usually love sports movies and was really looking forward to seeing Friday Night Lights after hearing such good things about it for the past four years or so, but I thought this was a terrible film! The action took way too long to unfold, the film lacked focus, and the god forsaken shaky-cam effects made watching the thing practically unbearable.
Whenever I’m bored with a movie, I watch the timer on my DVD player instead of the screen. The first game of the season began near the 27-minute mark, and up to that point there was just one other football scene (the first practice). So that means the directors spent a leisurely 20+ minutes hammering home the fact that yes, by god, Odessa does love football. Yeah, thanks… I really needed that long to figure it out.
I also didn’t like the way the film didn’t have much of a focus. It wasn’t about the whole team, as there were plenty of faceless players who didn’t have speaking roles. It wasn’t about the coach. It wasn’t about the quarterback. It wasn’t about the star running back whose lifelong dream was shattered in an instant. As a result of this lack of focus, I didn’t identify with any of the characters, and ended up not caring what happened to any of them, which made for a very boring film.
The best scene in Friday Night Lights for me was when Boobie Miles finally accepted his fate and realized that football wouldn’t be in the cards. When he cleaned out his locker and quietly threw away the Mercedes catalog he’d been looking at, I got a clear picture of how much the kid was banking on a pro career to make his life worth something.
If there had been more personal moments like the one with Boobie Miles at his locker, then Friday Night Lights would have been a much better film. As it was, though, I didn’t like the result at all. I give it just 4.0 stars out of 10.
I usually don’t pay much attention to celebrity baby pics because I think it’s kind of creepy that the paparazzi fall all over themselves to try to get these types of shots. But this morning I was looking through a bunch of different gossip sites and I came across several photos of the most sought-after celebrity babies, including Suri Cruise, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt,