Movie #60 2020: Friday Night Lights (2004)

Before watching Friday Night Lights, I wasn’t sure how much people who don’t care about play calls, long snaps, and wide receivers would care about it. Answer: probably not at all to be honest. Lucky for me, I’m obsessed with football, so sports movies are kinda my jam.

Some of my all-time favourite movies include Remember the Titans and Field of Dreams, so it’s difficult to not compare it to them. What I can say is this: no, it’s not as monumental as either of those films, but as a teen sports movie, it’s actually pretty decent.

Unfortunately, the characters as individuals are not that likeable. However as a team, they’re pretty easy to root for, so at least you can get behind them. (Again though, not in a Remember the Titans kind of way. It’s basically like being a die hard Giants fan but being happy for the Chiefs and their Super Bowl win… You don’t actually care whether they succeed or not, but it’s nice when they beat the historically ”bigger” teams).

Now, in terms of the storyline… meh. I mean, it’s fine… But as usual, it’s the same old ”star player gets injured so they have to pull off some sort of miracle comeback” kind of sports movie you’d expect. (Which is funny because Titans is an actual Disney movie and manages to exceed that expectation). It’s because of the unoriginal plot that I can’t rate it as highly as works of sports movie art such as Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball. Yes, I understand that this movie is based on a true story, but in that case, they picked a pretty boring high school football story to focus on. Of course I’m not including Texas Bowl finale in this analysis of the plot, because the conclusion was at least a little less predictable.

As you may or may not know, Friday Night Lights succeeded in gaining a TV spin-off series as a result of this movie, which I’ve heard is better than this. If you’ve seen it, please let me know if this is correct!

In short, I’m not going to recommend this movie, but it’s not completely terrible either.

Friday Night Lights is available to stream on Netflix UK.

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