Draft Day

We've all seen a plethora of baseball films in our lifetime--the list is endless: "Black Sunday", Any Given Sunday", "Knute Rockne All American", "Leatherheads", "Friday Night Lights", "All the Right Moves", etc, etc, etc. Can you believe that we have yet another film to add to that never ending list? Yes, and it's in the form of "Draft Day".

On the day of the NFL Draft, the Cleveland Browns' general manager Sonny Weaver (Kevin Costner) has the opportunity to rebuild his team when he trades for the number one pick. He makes this trade with GM Tom Michaels (Patrick St. Esprit) of the Seattle Seahawks. The number one pick is for Bo Callahan (Josh Pence). With this trade everyone including his coach, Penn (Denis Leary) his QB, Brian Drew (Tom Welling) even his mom, Barb (Ellen Burstyn) are not exactly in agreement with the trade, except the owner Anthony Molina (Frank Langella) who only sees huge bucks. Really, the only support Sonny seams to have is from his girlfriend Ali (Jennifer Garner) who is also his financial person in the office. Weaver must quickly decide what he's willing to sacrifice in pursuit of perfection as the lines between his personal and professional life become blurred on a life-changing day for a few hundred young men with dreams of playing in the NFL.

Others to round out the cast are Sam Elliott as Coach Moore, Sean Combs as Chris Crawford, Terry Crews as Earl Jennings, Chadwick Boseman as Vontae Mack, a rival draft pick, Kevin Dunn as Marvin, a team rep, Chi McBride as Walt Gordon, Arian Foster as Ray Jennings, another rival pick and son of Earl, Griffin Newman as Rick the Intern, W. Earl Brown as Ralph Mowry, security for the Browns, Christopher Cousins as Max Stone, Patrick Breen as Bill Zotti, Pat Healy as Jeff Carson, Brad William Henke as Tony the Trainer, and Wallace Langham as Pete Begler.

This was directed with such professionalism and finesse by veteran Ivan Reitman ("Meatballs" '79, "Stripes" '81, "Ghostbusters" '84, "Twins" '88, "Kindergarten Cop" '90, "Dave" '93, "Junior" '94, "Fathers' Day" '97, "Six Days Seven Nights" '98, "My Super Ex-Girlfriend " '06, "No Strings Attached" '11) plus others. He has an innate ability to direct a lot of comedies whereas the characters are like real people instead of your typical cartoon characters in order to extract a manipulative laugh from his audience. It was effectively written by Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph in that this is a story about the day in the life of an NFL draft and these guys were actually able to create a story around this process. That can't be easy to execute. There were a couple of areas that seemingly meandered, but, at the end of the day, this was a winner.

Whether you're a football fan or not, I think anyone will be able to relate to the pressures that Sonny went through, because part of life are the stresses, anxieties that are seemingly overwhelming until we figure out a way to make those proverbial lemons into lemonade.

Out of 4 Stars: 3.5                      Rated: PG-13                         109mins.