Featuring a strong, but not particularly Oscar-worthy performance of Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gaines, director Peter Berg uses a screenplay he co-wrote with David Aaron Cohen from H.G. Bissinger's book, "Friday Night Lights" to give us a fly-on-the-wall trip into Permian-Odessa High school's football team. Our concentration is on particular players such as Boobie (Derek Luke), number 45 in the lineup and the town's heroic point man, and also Brian (Jay Hernandez), Lucas (Mike Winchell), and Don (Garrett Hedlund). Despite this focus, we learn almost nothing about them as individuals, as Peter Berg is more intent on showing how they pass, block and run than on what makes they run on the inside. Though all are seniors at the school (looking more like the twenty-something that the actors really are), there is little talk about college or about future plans, though as an epilogue we find out that these people, having each garnered their fifteen minutes of fame, wind up with staid jobs like insurance sales and the like. While individual character is not the forte of this production, Berg does succeed in showing up how high-school football is a secular religion in this West Texas town, the shopkeepers closing up when each big competition is one with signs proclaiming "Gone to the game."

Cinematographer Tobias Schlissler put us on the fifty-yard line and then some, honing on the expressions of the individuals, their passion for the sport, the willingness to give all in the hope of victory. In fact when the star player, Boobie, hurts his knee and a radiologist recommends that he wait the season out, Boobie physically attacks the doctor and tears up the chart. David Rosenbloom and Colby Parker Jr.'s frantic editing, presumably to show us in the audience how frenetic the activities are, serves instead as a distraction almost as bad as the intrusive soundtrack. As sports films go, "Friday Night Lights" is OK, but not at all the groundbreaker some critics have pronounced it to be.