Draft Day is the NFL's answer to the very successful Moneyball. Obviously. So, straight up, here's the deal... I like sports. I love baseball. Moneyball was a fantastic movie from a film lover's point of view. Moneyball may have been one of the best baseball movies ever made from a baseball fan's point of view. I think football is alright. It's a dumb sport where dudes mash on each other over a ball. It's a sport that pays thugs who get arrested for assaulting people, doing drugs, and all sorts of other idiot ideas these hard-hitting morons come up with. I don't like that a man can be publicly ousted for being arrested or being a lawful "troublemaker" and make more money than I'll ever dream of making. That's my gripe with football. So, I don't follow the players closely like I do in baseball. I don't care what round so-and-so was drafted in or where he went to college. I don't watch the NFL Draft when it airs. I watch my San Francisco 49ers year after year blue ball me into thinking they have another shot at a Super Bowl. I make nachos and drink beer on the Sundays that they do this. This is the extend of my relationship with football. So, to say that I watched Draft Day more for my secret love of Kevin Costner and my general love of sports in general would be accurate.
Draft Day takes place over a twelve-hour span before the actual Draft. Sonny Weaver (Costner) the GM of the Cleveland Browns has a decent amount of shit happening in his life the morning of the draft. He's accidentally knocked up a co-worker (Jennifer Garner) whom he's tried to keep a secret. He's reacted unfavorably to this news and has caused a bit of tension there. He's constantly being questioned by the owner of the Browns (Frank Langella) and potential draft picks (Chadwick Boseman, Aryan Foster) as to who he's going to select as the seventh pick of the draft. He's then offered the first pick in the first round of the draft if he trades away his first round picks for the next three years. He agrees. So, now he spends the rest of the film trying to figure out if the guy projected to go number one is worth it or not.
I feel as though I've probably already lost most non-sports fans here. They've already skipped the rest of this and gone down to look at the letter grade. But, that's kind of how the movie is also. Non-sports fans, I don't personally believe are actually going to give half a shit about this movie. They'll want to skip to the end to see who Sonny picks. Then, once it happens, it'll be met with an "Oh. Cool." And Draft Day will be instantly forgotten. While I feel that Moneyball did have more of a wider appeal than just baseball fans, Draft Day isn't going to drag anyone else into the theater.
The writing of the movie is a bit sloppy. Costner is great. He was perfectly cast is able to weave the biggest decision of his career into the stress of trades, the stress of a girlfriend, the stress of a mother, the stress of an owner, the stress of an unhappy head coach, and the general stress of life into one solid character that I feel is generally cared about. I've never been a Jennifer Garner fan, but she actually was able to not upset me with her plain performance this time. In fact, every actor did their respective jobs very well, but Moneyball this movie was not. Aaron Sorkin has a gift that just isn't transferable nor repeatable.
It's an enjoyable movie if you happen to be a sports fan or even a Costner fan. There were sub-plots inserted in order to add a little more character to Sonny and give the non-sports film watchers something to care about, but they fell flat immediately. The baby, the mother... all of it was cheesy, tacky, and very unnecessary. It took away from the true matter at hand of the movie. I've also been told by a semi-reliable source that the draft that occurs would probably never happen in real life and if it did might go down as one of the worst drafts in the history of football which took out all realism the film had going for it. Not knowing that deeply about football... I thought it seemed a bit stupid as well, but at least the characters in the film were aware of this stupidity.
I was entertained. I got to watch Costner. What more was I looking for?
B-
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