Great Sports Drama

Rating: 6/10 (2 May 2005)

Friday Night Lights is a very entertaining sports drama that captures the real life energy of football. The town of Odessa, Texas has seen better times, struggling with closing businesses and poverty, but those problems seem to disappear every Friday night, as the community rallies around its local high school football team, the Permian Panthers, as led by Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton). Friday Night Lights follows the 1988 season in the Panthers' quest to get to the State Championship. The plot sounds pretty good and the execution is also very good. Even though you have heard the story a bunch of times, this film still manages to keep you interested. I don't know how the story happened so I can't comment if Hollywood changed a lot of things. Even if they did, the film is nicely executed and very entertaining to watch. The acting was very good as they captured the energy and effort the real life players put into the game. The best was Billy Bob Thornton as Gary Gaines and he played the role very effectively. Tim McGraw was great as Charles Billingsley and I wasn't even expecting him to be that good. Derek Luke does a good job playing Boobie Miles and makes up for being in Spartan. Garrett Hedlund, Jay Hernandez and Lucas Black all play players on the team. They each play their roles well and I think the best out of them is Lucas Black. Peter Berg does a good job of directing, making the movie feel and look exciting. He also directed The Rundown which was pretty good as well. The film is full of clichés but that has become unavoidable for all sport movies. Its also kind of short for this type of film at only 118 minutes long and that goes by fast as this is a very nice film to watch. The ending was also unexpected since usually the underdog wins but not in this film. The character development wasn't very good either. I still felt for the characters since I was very into the film but it may be hard for others. This movie is also better then Miracle and Remember the Titans. In the end, this is a very nice sports drams that's defiantly worth checking out. Rating 8/10, not only for football fans but for the average movie goer as well.