This is one of those movies that I stumbled across at 2am when I really should’ve just been going to bed, but I didn’t … and despite not really caring a lick about sports, it actually ended up being pretty entertaining.
The whole story follows about a 12-hour period leading up until NFL Draft Day when all of the managers are fighting over who’s going to pick who, and it was almost surprising how exciting they made the story flow from one conflict to another until everything all got wrapped up neatly with a nice, little bow at the end.
The only casting that I didn’t really care for was Jennifer Garner as Costner’s wife … when I first saw her appear on the screen with “news,” I honestly thought she was going to say he was going to be a grandpa. Which is funny if you consider just the other day there was a news story about a 37 year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal being told that she’s too old to play the lover of a 55 year-old man … in this movie Kevin Costner is 60 compared to Garner’s 43 and I thought that she looked way too young for him!
Plus the whole baby arc admittedly kind of felt like a forced plot for the sake of having one, but whatever.
The rest of the movie was enjoyable, or at least 2am enjoyable. I kind of liked Denis Leary’s role just because it didn’t plug him into the loud and ever-boisterous character that he usually becomes, and everyone else frankly just kind of stayed out of Kevin Costner’s way and let him deal with his issues.
In a way it sort of reminded me of Sports Night, which was one of my favorite comedies because despite being about sports, more so it was really about the characters and their relationships and interactions, and the sports themselves were more of a backdrop than a focal point. I didn’t need to understand plays and strategies and how trading works to enjoy this movie – it was just kind of fun to watch how the chaos all unfolded…