Avis Metacritic

In his most effective full star turn in perhaps a decade, Kevin Costner dominates as the greenhorn general manager of the beleaguered Cleveland Browns.

Draft Day affords the simple but uncommon pleasure of watching intelligent characters who are passionate about what they do trying to do the best that they can.

As a hypothetical, all-access documentary about the kookiest day in draft history, it's oddly satisfying, maybe because watching the actual, bloated spectacle (scheduled this year for May 8) is so often underwhelming.

Draft Day feels like a play, and I don't mean a football play. It feels like a play-play at its sporadic best, in the same way J.C. Chandor's 2011 "Margin Call" felt that way.

While Draft Day is a very agreeable and predictable movie, it is also very timely.

The biggest problem with Draft Day is that even as it shows Sonny sticking to his guns, its absurd, saccharine third act suggests Reitman didn’t stick to his, and allowed his latest celebration of free-spirited mavericks to get co-opted by the very kind of system they were created to criticize.

It’s the first, and probably last, sports comedy to take its visual cues from Ang Lee’s "Hulk."

Costner and Garner are good and Langella properly menacing, but Leary has lost his fastball and seems to be holding something back in his quarrel scenes with Costner. Costner has to carry the film, which he does.

The promising-sounding football movie would turn out to be a movie about men talking on phones.

Haven’t Cleveland fans suffered enough? Not only have they never won a Super Bowl, but now the Browns serve as the center of Ivan Reitman’s painfully creaky sports drama.