Big problems in this flick

Rating: 5/10 (14 October 2004)

This film, unfortunately looks like it was pieced together, agonized over, and shots thrown in just for the heck of it...very disjointed. The character development is almost nil. The main protagonists have NO backstory. They are presented AS IS and you fill in the spaces. Afterwards you will ask yourself, where was that guy's mother? How come the abusive father makes a 180 at the end of the film? What motivates the coach? ETC.,ETC. I thought, O.K. just enjoy it for the football segments, but those were hard to watch, with twitchy, fast-moving camera work, ridiculous foley work with bone-cracking sounds, grunting like bulls in heat, and collisions that sound like somebody dropping ton-weight sacks of grain off a building! The entire film looks like when you sharpen your digital images just one step too many - grainy and extremely defined. I guess they were going for a kind of documentary look but it came across as just plain annoying to look at. The colors, too, were washed out like weak tea and the extreme close-ups are interesting if you want to count the pores on Billy Bob Thornton's face (frankly, I don't).