‘Murica! Home of the real football: NFL. Yeah none of that Commie soccer crap around here! And this week is the countdown to the biggest sports game in the history of mankind, the Super Bowl. At least until next year’s Super Bowl.
This year my beloved Kansas City Chiefs take on Satan’s minions, the Philadelphia Eagles. They are so bad that their mayor doesn’t know how to spell “Eagles.” (It’s true, look it up.) Clearly, the nation is behind us as shown by this map of where the support is:
Huh. Ok well, screw the rest of the nation.
Anyhow, in the spirit of the upcoming Super Bowl I decided to do some football movie reviews. I wanted to stick with any that were NFL or at least tried to be NFL, even though they couldn’t get the license. I also tried to avoid movies that were based on true events. It’s no fun to shred a movie that was about a high school team that was killed in a plane crash, died of AIDS, or got a nasty case of hiccups or whatever.
Those of you Philistines who don’t understand or care about the NFL (weirdos) let me explain that Football season is nearly a year-long thing. It’s not just the games. It ends in February with the Super Bowl but it starts in April with the draft when kids coming out of college are selected by various teams to be players in the NFL. Picking the right player is very important for the long-term success of the team.
So with that in mind, we’ll start with 2014’s Draft Day.
Draft Day
Draft Day stars Kevin Costner in his beginning stages of grizzled, something he would really embrace later with Yellowstone. He plays Sonny Weaver, the general manager of a fictional version of the Cleveland Browns. It’s draft day and he has the number 7 of the draft. See there are 32 teams and 7 rounds of the draft, so do the math. Having the seventh overall pick is pretty high but too high for the player he wants and not high enough for the big prospect of the draft, a QB named Bo Callahan (Josh Pence).
He really wants Vontae Mack (Chadwick Boseman), a defensive prospect that he believes in, but the rest of the consensus around the league is that he has issues.
The morning, the owner of the Browns (Frank Langella) meets with Sonny to basically goad him into making a “big splash.” He doesn’t exactly specify what it is, just that it needs to get the fans excited. This along with the news that his girlfriend Ali, the Brown’s finance manager played by Jennifer Garner, is pregnant.
There are also a lot of concerns with Sonny’s ability to do the GM job as he is the former beloved coach’s son, who he fired just before he died. The new coach Penn, played by Denis Leary, isn’t making things any easier with various complaints, though Sonny believes he can be a good coach.
So yeah, a sports movie with Kevin Costner whose character has unresolved issues with his dead father. This sounds familiar.
Sonny decides to trade the pick, along with next year and the year after, the number one pick, to Seattle to move up in the draft. It’s assumed he’s going to pick Callahan even though he’s not really enthused by it and it enrages his current quarterback (Tom Welling) who is primed to have a great season.
The rest of the movie is balanced with a lot of Sonny’s personal struggles with Ali and coming to grips with firing his dad and the chess moves of the draft itself. When he’s on the clock and ends up picking Vontae, it’s pretty hilarious how it throws the entire draft into a tailspin, not just for the Browns but for the rest of the teams trying to understand why he wouldn’t pick the completely obvious player.
Having watched a fair amount of drafts, most of them go about how you expect, but there have been examples where a player who is touted to be awesome ends up falling down the draft board or when someone gets picked a lot higher than expected.
Patrick Mahomes went number 10, far higher than anyone expected at the time but it turned out to be a great pick. I also remember in 2007 quarterback Brady Quinn was supposed to be the number one pick and didn’t go until number 22. He also ended up having a nothing career. So this part of the movie I really enjoyed as it’s not inaccurate.
Review
Ivan Reitman directed Draft Day and it was his last one. I’d say he went out on a high note, but certainly not anywhere near his glory days of Stripes and Ghostbusters. It manages to tie up all the character threads nicely and you really want to see how it’s all going to turn out.
The editing is interesting where you have Sonny talking with a manager of another team on the phone but the two will wander in and out of each other’s frame, it’s a nice method to show the chaos of the moment.
You get to know the various players involved just enough to care about their stories. The quarterback prospect clearly has some leadership issues that talent alone won’t be able to overcome, even with his college coach (Sam Elliot) papering them over. Vontae Mack needs to get as high a pick as he can, as the higher you get picked, the more money you make. He may seem a little rough but has his priorities correct in taking care of his family.
The running back prospect who is the son of a beloved retired player. The current quarterback who’s worked hard in the off-season to heal from injury, strengthen up and really set to get to the next level, only to watch the draft looking like he might lose his job.
A new coach that won a ring, but did he do it himself, or did he inherit a good team? He has lots to prove. And finally, Sonny, who not only has a kid now on the way, but finally can prove that he can make a team without his father looking over his shoulder.
There’s a ton of great talent in the movie and if you’re a sucker for sports movies, this may or may not be for you. Let me explain, most sports movies follow a very specific formula. Either you get the comedy of a cartoon underdog who somehow overcomes all odds to win, or the weepy melodrama based on a true story that over-dramatizes the original event. This is neither of those and for that, I find it a breath of fresh air.
The pacing is brisk and the acting is impeccable. Add to that they used actual NFL teams and a ton of real-life sports personality cameos so it really comes across as authentic. Knowing what I do about the NFL, I find it all very believable.
More football movies are on the way!
