One of the worst movies in recent years

Rating: 3/10 (7 November 2004)

I have to say that I thought that not only was this film possibly the WORST sports film ever, but that it was one of the worst movies I have ever had the pain of seeing. Especially in the theater. It ranks right up there with Godzilla '98, Alien 4, and of course, Armageddon.
My reasons for saying this are not unfounded. It is a terrible movie in several respects. First is that all of the characters in the film are like static cardboard stand-ups that basically stay exactly the same (personality-wise) for the whole movie. Sure, they are based on real people and Peter Berg & company probably wanted to be as accurate as possible but this might be the one movie that makes you understand why some other films contain events depicted "for dramatization purposes only". If you adapt real-life in a boring and unattached way, it does not make for a good movie.
Of course, there are many other complaints in all departments. Subplots in the film are either alluded to and never explained (as in the QB's supposedly ill mother) or introduced and dropped (as in the same QB's phone conversation with an unknown/unseen sibling about their mother). No football game depicted, save perhaps for the final anticlimactic championship, takes up more than a minute and a half of screen time, and during that time all we see is a bunch of nondescript catching, running, and tackling complete with surround sound thuds and crashes. We see no plays actually being executed, only referenced by the obligatory radio commentators placed into bad sports movies like this to give you the illusion that something is actually going on when it is really closer to a free-for-all.
Yes, the cinematography was also horrible. I might have just been looking at an old print but it looked terribly overexposed in some kind of attempt to make it look more like 1988 (when it takes place). It also suffered from the same faults that NYPD Blue has always suffered from and that is the caffeine-charged camera operator who cannot help zooming in and out and moving up, down, side to side during almost all shots. I am aware that this was probably Berg's attempt to be "arty", but he is actually much much less talented than he thinks he is. This is also evidenced by his co-screen writing credit, which makes him partly responsible for one of the most terribly underdeveloped scripts I've ever seen put on film.
With this film, Peter Berg indeed begins to cement his position as one of the worst modern directors, in my opinion. "Very Bad Things" was also a horrible film, and one look at his upcoming features ("Hip Hop Cops"?!) does nothing to quell my fears of his ineptitude. In summary, this is indeed NOT one of the best sports films of all time, but is actually one of the WORST FILMS EVER, let alone one of the worst to debut in the Box Office Top 3.