Movie Review - Friday Night Lights (2004) Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Lucas Black, and Tim McGraw

That is the central question posed by Permian High School Head Football Coach Gary Gaines to his players at the team's training camp in August 1988. Gaines has already told his team that they need to be perfect because their job is to protect their school and their community, and the only way they can do their job is to be perfect, winning every game, including the Texas state football championship.

Thus begins Friday Night Lights, a 2004 sports movie that tells the story of the Permian High School Panthers 1988 football season. Based upon a true story outlined in H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book of the same name, Friday Night Lights stars Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke, Lucas Black, and Tim McGraw, and combines superb acting, outstanding writing, and top-notch action sequences to forge one of the best sports movies of the new century.

Permian High School is located in Odessa, Texas, a small city (population: 100,000) located in west Texas. It is one of two secondary schools in the city, and boasts a perennial powerhouse of a football team. As the 1988 season approaches, the team - nicknamed the Panthers - has already won four state championships in the space of 20 years, and has been an almost annual fixture in district and regional championship games. The school's motto - MOJO - reflects not only the school's passion for winning, but also the community's obsession with seeing its boys win. Gary Gaines has been hired as head football coach with the tacit understanding that his job is to win championships... nothing less will do.

Friday Night Lights takes viewers through the whirlwind 1988 season, highlighting most games along the way. Action focuses on Coach Gaines and three key players: quarterback Mike Winchell, who's highly capable, but whose nerves are constantly being frayed not only by the pressure to win every game, but by family matters as well; running back Boobie Miles, the most talented player on the team, a cocky braggart whose natural athletic gifts are frequently overshadowed by his mouth; and Don Billingsley, another running back whose troubles maintaining a grip on the football lead to problems with his alcoholic father, who's also a former star Permian player.

The Panthers' season gets off to an inauspicious start when they lose one of their first regular season games. At that point the community considers the entire season lost and registers its discontent, as Gaines finds out when he returns home after the game. His front lawn has become a forest of "House For Sale" signs, gifts from a community suggesting that maybe it's time for him to leave town.

The team redoubles its efforts, however, and goes on an extended winning streak, including a close-fought victory over archrival Midland Lee High School. The team's MOJO has returned. Trouble is... is it enough to get the Panthers into the playoffs? You'll have to watch Friday Night Lights to find out!

Friday Night Lights is one of the most remarkable sports films I've seen in a long time, and certainly one of the best of its genre to be released in the twenty-first century. Everything about this film - the acting, writing, action sequences, and especially the movie's underlying premise - is simply terrific. Of course, one expects Billy Bob Thornton to deliver a first-rate performance as Coach Gary Gaines, and Thornton does not disappoint. But his outstanding work in this film is equaled, if not overshadowed, by exceptional performances from a pair of supporting actors: Derek Luke as Boobie Miles and Tim McGraw (yes, the country music star!) as Charles Billingsley. Luke's portrayal of the brash, loudmouthed, arrogant, but supremely talented Miles illuminates the screen; McGraw brings a tough, gritty, poignancy to his role as the alcoholic father of Don Billingsley, a man incapable of hiding his disappointment at his son's failures on the gridiron.

The best sports films are the ones that successfully and realistically portray on-field action to their viewers. The many football action sequences in Friday Night Lights certainly rank among the very best I've ever seen in a sports movie. Many times I felt I was on the field with the players as they blocked, tackled, passed, kicked, and punted.

As good as the performances and action sequences are, it is the underlying premise of Friday Night Lights that sets this film apart as one of the best sports films of recent years. This movie does a marvelous job of examining the role of sports in our American culture, with particular emphasis on the relationship between a town and its high school football team. H.G. Bissinger wrote about this with great eloquence in his book Friday Night Lights, and the film is no less powerful in its examination of the same phenomenon. The community surrounding Permian High School is a football-crazed society; everything revolves around the young men who play on the Panthers football team. Coaches are hired to win championships and are fired when they don't; sports radio talk shows discuss the team's successes and failures, sometimes in vituperative language, year round. The pressure for teenage boys to succeed is unrelenting. Everyone seems caught in a surreal obsession with winning at all costs.

If all of this seems like hyperbole to those unfamiliar with high school football in the Deep South of the United States, let me reassure you... it's not. My experiences as a spectator at high school football games in Georgia and Florida in the late 1980s and early 1990s are a personal testimony to the same kind of community obsession with their football teams as that which existed in Odessa, Texas. Friday Night Lights could have been shot in Valdosta, Georgia, or Niceville, Florida, and the only things that would have changed would have been the names of the players and coaches.

MY VERDICT:Friday Night Lights is pure sports entertainment from beginning to end. It not only has marvelous performances and superb action sequences throughout its two-hour running time; it also conveys a vitally important message about our American obsession with sports at all levels in our society. A "must-see!"