Remember the “Moneyball” scene in which cagey Brad Pitt outfoxes his rivals on the phone with a series of trades? “Draft Day” aims to stretch that two minutes of fast and funny into a whole movie. Only “Draft Day” is lumbering and predictable, and its hero general manager is so foolhardy, it should have been called “Dummyball.”
Kevin Costner is the GM of the Cleveland Browns (the NFL, which almost never allows its trademarks to be used in movies, this time is a full participant). Hours before the annual draft of top college players, he makes a deal to move up from the seventh pick to the very first one in order to draft the hot-shot quarterback everyone wants who could turn his team around. For this he gives up three consecutive first-round draft picks, which is risky but not necessarily unwise. What’s beyond idiotic is that only after he makes the deal does he start nosing around to figure out whether he actually wants the player for whom he just mortgaged his future.
Meanwhile, another, less-hyped player is seen shepherding small children to gym class, giving a game ball to his dying sister, solving Third World poverty, etc. So you can see where the main action is heading as clearly as you can map out the subplot in which Costner’s Sonny Weaver Jr. resolves his daddy issues: In a short period of time, he fired his own papa as coach, watched him die and found out he’s going to be a father himself, thanks to a secret affair with a fellow team exec (Jennifer Garner). And on the busiest day of his year, his mom (Ellen Burstyn) shows up with an urnful of Dad and demands that the ashes be sprinkled all over the practice field, right this minute.
The story is as thin as a waterboy. Characters keep spelling out what they’re supposed to stand for or what a scene means. “Just to be clear, you’re threatening to fire me?” Sonny asks the team owner (Frank Langella) who has just threatened to fire him. As if Sonny, or we, need to be told that losing games leads to losing jobs.
Denis Leary, who provides the only spark of intelligence in the film, plays the coach who rightly argues that he needs to be kept in the loop, but Sonny keeps making decisions without informing him, with the GM’s arrogance and insensitivity meant to read as brilliance. And what’s the Leary character doing here in the first place? For no apparent reason, he came over from Dallas, where he was not only successful but won a Super Bowl.
Ivan Reitman, the “Ghostbusters” director, has so completely lost his touch that he plays incessantly with split-screens as though he’s just discovered the effect in film school, and his doltish screenwriters can arrange glory for Sonny only by making another character inexplicably turn even stupider than he is. Once I saw a football game in which the very first snap sailed over the quarterback’s head and into the end zone for a safety, yet somehow things got even worse from there. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of that game.