Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ, Person of Interest) is playing the role of Coach Ladouceur, with Michael Chiklis (Fantastic Four, Eagle Eye) backing him up as Assistant Coach Eidson, and Thomas Carter (who's covered high school sports at the movies before with his 2005 film Coach Carter) in the director's chair. The trailer barely conceals its hopes of cashing in on the faith-based craze that seems to be making a bigger splash at the movies this year than any other year on recent record. That's not to say it's a bad film, but you can clearly tell this is going to be attached to prints of Heaven Is For Real on Wednesday night, in hopes that the genre wave won't crash any time soon.
Still, this trailer portrays tragedy upon tragedy occurring in a town that lost a football game. Yes, it was the end of a nine year streak, but in the end it was just a football game. A lot of towns are all about their high school football program, but no matter how you slice it, it is still a game. To most people, this hardly seems like a reasonable reaction to such a course of events, but then again life isn't always reasonable. Probably the greatest obstacle when any high school football movie is released is when it's compared against the two-film litmus test known as Friday Night Lights and Remember The Titans.
We'll just leave the trailers to both of those films at the bottom of the page and let you guys decide for yourselves whether it passes muster or not. When The Game Stands Tall, based on the book by Neil Hayes, is scheduled for a September 19th release this fall.
