Football drama doesn't hit hard enough

Kevin Costner returns to sports, but Draft Day doesn't score big.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until Kevin Costner -- having dealt with baseball (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game) and golf (Tin Cup) -- turned his attention to football.

In Draft Day -- an Ivan Reitman-directed story set in Cleveland -- Costner plays Sonny Weaver, general manager of the beleaguered Cleveland Browns.

Sonny's struggling to establish his legitimacy. He's the son of a late Browns coach who was revered by one and all, but who was fired by Sonny toward the end of his career.

Sonny, who has the number one pick in the draft, has his eye on a great defensive player (Chadwick Boseman) and a running back with a troubled past (Adrian Foster).

The team's owner (Frank Langella) and just about everyone else wants Sonny to draft a hot-shot quarterback (Josh Pence).

The movie evolves over the course of one draft day, leading up to the moment when general managers must make their picks.

The big question: Will Sonny follow his instincts or try to appease Cleveland's discontented fans?

Sonny's personal life adds further complications. His girlfriend (Jennifer Garner) -- who handles the team's salary cap -- happens to be pregnant.

No faulting Costner who's convincing as a man trying to navigate a difficult course. But Draft Day could have used more kick.

In what appears to be an overzealous search of authenticity, Reitman populates Draft Day with NFL types, ESPN stalwarts and anyone else who can make the proceedings feel real.

It's possible that screenwriters Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph wanted to give Draft Day inside-football appeal, but at times the movie seems to be looking for the NFL's seal of approval. This is not football's Moneyball.

The GMs wheel and deal, and try to out-maneuver one another, but there's little in Draft Day that can be read as critical of the NFL, an organization that doesn't exactly welcome criticism.

It has been 15 years since Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday (1999), but it's almost as if Draft Day was conceived as an antidote for Stone's cynicism.

Cynicism among players in Draft Day proves equally scarce. For that, you'll have to go back to North Dallas Forty (1979), possibly the best football movie yet.

The supporting cast doesn't have a lot to do except try to look savvy. Denis Leary signs on as the coach of the Browns, another guy who wants Costner to draft a quarterback.

And if you're looking for incongruity try this: Ellen Burstyn -- hardly an actress you expect to see in a sports movie -- plays Sonny's mother.

I don't know how wise it is to make a football movie in which the bulk of the action takes over telephones. But for me, it wasn't the grunt of hard-hitting that I missed, but the high, lofty spiral of critical analysis that might have made Draft Day more socially relevant.

When it comes to attitude and a strong point of view -- invaluable in a contempoary sports movie -- Draft Day fails to put enough spin on the ball.

Will love get in way of wanton sex?

Portman's fine; Kutcher, not so much. No Strings Attached falters.

Having won a Golden Globe and a variety of critics' association honors for her performance as a disturbed ballerina in The Black Swan, Natalie Portman seems a shoo-in for a best actress Oscar. The new and, alas, negligible romantic comedy No Strings Attached, isn't exactly a warm-up for Oscars' big prize, but it probably won't do anything to diminish Portman's glow.

No Strings Attached isn't much of a movie, but consider this: Portman's playing a role that might have gone to such rom-com divas as Drew Barrymore, Katherine Heigl or Jennifer Aniston. If you see the movie, think about what it might have been had any of those actresses taken Portman's place.

Proving herself an able enough comic actress, Portman holds the movie together as it zips through a variety of situations that are designed to delay the inevitable union of on-again/off-again lovers.

No Strings marks the first movie to be directed by Ivan Reitman (father of Jason) since 2006's My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Reitman's spry direction and screenwriter Elizabeth Meriwether's mildly off-color script keep No Strings from feeling precisely like every other rom-com that's been cluttering the nation's multiplexes.

Meriwether builds her R-rated script around a provocative question: Is it possible for two young people to carry on a torrid sexual affair without wanting to deepen their relationship?

That brings me to Ashton Kutcher, the movie's other marquee name. Kutcher piles on his all-too-familiar sheepish charm, and, at one point, bounces his naked butt across the screen. When it comes to rom-coms, he may be the male equivalent of the Barrymores, Heigls and Anistons, which means he's entirely too predictable.

Here's how the story goes: Portman's Emma, a medical resident at a Los Angeles hospital, proposes a sex-only affair to Kutcher's Adam, an assistant on a TV sitcom. Scorched by a large helping of paternal humiliation - his dad (Kevin Kline) is dating one of his ex-girlfriends -- Adam agrees to Emma's proposition.

Adam and Emma go at it with enthusiasm until Adam begins craving some real intimacy. The emotionally defended Emma doesn't want to detract from her consuming schedule. She's also terrified of commitment.

No Strings is not without sour notes, the loudest of them sounded by Kline, who starred in Reitman's 1993 comedy, Dave. Kline plays Kutcher's father, a faded TV star whose embarrassingly randy behavior pushes the dejected Adam into a drunken evening during which he kicks off his relationship with Emma.

Gifted a comic actor as he is, Kline can't entirely remove the odor of unpleasantness from the role of an older man who craves the fawning attentions of younger women.

There's an increasingly familiar quality to its overall arc, but Meriwether's script makes room for some decent one-liners. Too bad it doesn't allow for more significant contributions from the supporting cast. The only minor character who gets any decent play is Adam's co-workers, an obsessive talker played by Lake Bell.

I'm told that folks who sleep together but maintain every other form of distance are called "friends with benefits." Think of No Strings as a mediocre movie with benefits, most of them due to Portman who - up until the script calls for her to suffer - seems to be having loads of fun. Why not? Someone had to have a good time.