Mark Reviews Movies: UNDER THE STADIUM LIGHTS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

Here's a sports movie that doesn't necessarily want us to care about the sport being played, but Under the Stadium Lights ultimately can't escape the apparent necessity of formula. John Collins and Hamid Torabpour's screenplay is mostly about the lives of a few high school football players—the ones who have it particularly and obviously rough—as they endure hardships off the field and triumph on it. Everything about the lives of these characters, though, is left hanging at the end. The Big Game is all that really matters.

It's an especially dishonest way for Collins, Torabpour, and director Todd Randall to end this particular story, which constantly implies and directly asserts that what happens on the football field is only a reflection of these teenagers' willingness to do their best, ability to look out for each other, and drive toward determination and self-fulfillment. For a long time, the game doesn't matter to this movie, save for some archival footage of the real games the real team played in 2009 (or an accurate—and cheaply produced—facsimile of that footage), and then, for some unknowable but wholly wrongheaded reason, the game is the only thing that matters.

To be fair, the story off the field isn't especially deep or thoughtful, but that's also because this is primarily a message movie. The story, set in the small Texas town of Abilene, is based on a true one, naturally, and is adapted from a book by Al Pickett and Chad Mitchell, a cop and pastor and the team's spiritual counselor. In the big picture of this story, Mitchell is almost irrelevant, since he's there after practice on certain days to let the players speak freely and honestly about the things troubling them.

This should be their story, and while it is for the most part, Chad, played by Milo Gibson, is just as important as the teens—and, by the end, more important. He's the character who gives advice, who supports his community and the team (at the cost of his family life, of course, because that clichéd drama, apparently, is worth the sacrifice of the students' stories), and who provides the story with its central message.

The cost of Chad's story and the story's move toward the Big Game is the core story here. It belongs to high school football players like cousins Ronnell (Carter Redwood) and Herschell Sims (Acoryé White), as well as Augustine "Boo" Barrientes (Germain Arroyo). Chad and, hence, the movie's philosophy is that these young men need to learn and live the lesson of being their "brother's keeper," so it is a bit odd how only these three stories really matter and how each one seems isolated from the others.

Ronnell is dealing with a drug-addicted father (played by Eddie George), who makes plenty of promises he can't keep. Herschell's mother (played by Ruthie Austin) is arrested and sent back to prison after violating her parole. Boo feels the pressure of joining a local gang—the one that currently counts his older brother Zay (Nicholas Delgado) among its members. Also involved in that life is Albert (Noel Gugliemi), who was recently released from prison and looks to Chad for support in getting his life on track. A few scenes involving Chad's long-suffering wife Ashley (Abigail Hawk) round out the drama, but let's not forget to mention the inclusion of a glorified cameo from Laurence Fishburne, who plays the owner of a local barbecue joint—keeping the team fed and having a health scare that further distracts from everything else the movie is trying to do.

Collins and Torabpour eventually leave all of these threads dangling, as the movie ends with the results of the game (who won, which of the characters were named players of the match, what the final record of the season was, how the team was ranked, etc.) and some words of so-called wisdom/inspiration from the real Mitchell (They're all blocks of text on the screen and rather dull, predictable stuff). Some—namely, the stories of Ronnell and Herschell—are left without any resolution sooner than others, since Randall seems to feel obligated to give us the usual game-time interludes, a training montage, a pep rally, and a Big Speech from the team's coach (played by Glenn Morshower).

We're left questioning the sincerity of Under the Stadium Lights. That's a deal-breaker for a movie such as this, which wants us to care about and feel inspired by its characters. How can we feel that way when the movie doesn't seem to?

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