Metacritic reviews

By the film's end, I found myself simultaneously hoping that ESU would win its big game, and that the school would pull the plug on its football program. I guess that's how I was supposed to feel.

The Program tries to travel light and heavy, and the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-think doesn’t gel. Latham, who has previously bestowed upon us the ersatz pop reportage of “Urban Cowboy” and “Perfect,” doesn’t tunnel very deep into the world of college athletics. What he and Ward come up with is fairly standard stuff that seems derived mostly from old movies.

A routine Joe College movie.

As noisy and ludicrous as all this sounds, the movie does have its share of guilty pleasures. Like the kid on steroids, it's revved so high that it's out of control. And just as his coach does, it is possible -- though not easy -- for us to make the best of it.

THE PROGRAM was a surprisingly thoughtful entry in a season glutted with sports films. (RUDY; BLUE CHIPS; THE AIR UP THERE; ABOVE THE RIM; D2; and MAJOR LEAGUE 2.) The game sequences, in particular, are deftly choreographed and charged with a real sense of drama.

But once the action wanders off the playing field, "The Program" shows all the cleverness, originality and depth of the Chicago Bears' offense.

The Program starts in a fourth-down situation by being a sports movie with virtually no one for whom the audience can root — a major drawback, no matter how hackneyed those “Rocky”-ized finishes have become. Instead, Ward and co-writer Aaron Latham seek to indict big-time college football through a collection of cliches (money-doling boosters, steroid abuse, academic negligence , shady recruiting practices) and still want us to care about whether these players and coaches win the big game.

The Program has its high points, but there are too few of them, and I suspect that many of the film's "insider's touches" are a combination of fact and fiction. Principally, this a formula football movie. Those hoping to see a hard-hitting drama about life off the field should instead prepare to be inundated by a load of feeble, unimaginative material that's almost impossible to take seriously.

This hodgepodge of little stories about the members of a college football team contending for a championship is flaccid seasonal fare that will do all right its first few weeks at the box office amongst those starved for gridiron action but will fade from memory long before the Rose Bowl parade ends.

The lead character ostensibly is Coach Sam Winters, but the film never really focuses on the ethical compromises he needs to make and steers away from him. Thus, James Caan -- playing the coach -- appears in what amounts to a series of cameos. In fact, Caan seemingly just walks through his role, perhaps wondering how he got from "Brian's Song" to this thing.