"One of the greatest sports stores ever told ... "

Rating: 1/10 (15 January 2005)

" ... so let's completely rewrite it."
This is easily one of the most over-hyped movies of all time. Universal Pictures really went all out of this movie in terms of marketing -- odds are if you watched any TV this year you saw the various TV spots for this movie about 5000 times. Many of them touting the "positive" reviews this movie got and ALL of them pointing out that it is based on "one of the greatest sports stories ever told."
Which raises the question of why they completely re-wrote the story. While several reviewers (including the author of the book) claim the movie is "accurate", the truth of the matter is, if you changed the name of the school and the players, and renamed the movie, no one would recognize it. Maybe some people would see parallels with Boobie's story, but not by the ending. And they would all be wondering who that QB's crazy mom was supposed to be and why the MLB never talked.
The movie waffles between trying to be your typical popcorn football action movie (Varsity Blues), and some kind of hard-hitting drama. It fails at both. There's no suspense during the games because everyone has seen this formula a million times. And the major drama points in the movie (Don Billingsley's relationship with his alcoholic father, Mike Winchell's insane mom) are both totally ineffective and totally made-up by the writers. The book was powerful because it didn't flinch in telling two rather sad stories (Boobie and Mike). The movie removes all emotional impact by re-writing these stories to be more acceptable to mainstream viewers.
Why does this movie fail so bad? Because it fails to capture what high school football is all about. The close relationship with the fans and the players. The fans are proud mothers and fathers, brothers, girlfriends, friends, former players, and members of the community. There is a whole lot more emotional investment by the crowd at a high school football game than there is at an NFL or college game. The book went through a lot of trouble to tell the story of these die-hard Permian fans. But the movie portrays them as dumb rednecks. Which raises the question during the movie, why would you even WANT to play high school football if it were really like that?
0.0 out of 10 stars. Peter Berg should commit suicide for ruining such a great book. Varsity Blues was a far superior movie in the sense that at least it was entertaining, and didn't use the book's name as a crutch to sell tickets.
As a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the positive reviews on here were by Universal Pictures employees. They spent so much on TV ads trying to manipulate people into thinking it was a great movie, why not get some free publicity? I know Amazon.com had a TON of negative reviews, and now the customer review section for this movie has been ELIMINATED on there. I've NEVER seen that happen before.