...waited too long to become movie

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2005)

Friday Night Lights is a good movie - an excellent story of high school sports and the pressures placed on young kids to perform. What keeps FNL from being a great movie is the amount of time between the book and movie releases. In that interim period, the premise was used and over-used by MTV Productions, etc. to produce material that was wildly marketable to teenagers. This makes FNL seem worn-out and too similar to lesser movies that are still relatively fresh in the viewer's mind. Sadly, this also undermines the credibility of the film - Friday Nights Lights would have been a GREAT movie had it been released 10 years ago. Lucas Black deserves recognition; he's doing a nice job of building upon his accomplishments as a child actor (Sling Blade, etc.).