Friday Night Lights

Reviewed by:
Gene Newman

Get over those Varsity Blues and forget the Titans, 'cause Friday Night Lights is the best movie about high school football you'll ever see. In fact, with the exception of North Dallas Forty and The Longest Yard, it could be the best football movie ever made. (Sorry, Little Giants…)

Perfectly adapted from the best-selling book, Friday Night Lights is about the desolate town of Odessa, Texas, and its manic obsession with the local high school football team. The year is 1988 and a state-of-the-art football stadium sits on an otherwise dying Lonestar landscape. The parents live vicariously through their frightened 17-year-olds, while the coach returns to FOR SALE signs on his front yard following losses. Lights is so well assembled, it'll brainwash you into feeling as strongly about the team as the die-hard Permian Panthers fans. Rather than going through the motions of a typical sports movie and differentiating each player with needless, halfhearted plot gimmicks, the film is a true team effort, playing out almost like a documentary. Billy Bob Thornton scores again as the even-keeled coach in a town that has a million suggestions for how he should run his program, and his teenage cast of gridiron grunts seems as if it were plucked right off a high school practice field. The film's on-field action is filled with some of the hardest and most violent hits we've ever seen; the sounds of bones crunching and helmets colliding left us cringing as if each game were the opening to Saving Private Ryan.

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