When is Billy Bob Thornton best in a movie? When writers and directors keep his dialogue to a minimum, allowing him to stand there and act with the subtleties of his facial expressions.

That being said, in the new movie “Friday Night Lights” Billy Bob does too much talking, and yet he is the best part of the movie.

The movie, based on a book that was based on a true story, revolves around the season of the Permian High School football team in Odessa, Texas.

Is everyone excited yet?

The story follows the team as it opens the season favored to win the vaunted state championship, that most coveted of achievements that in Texas, apparently, will secure the rest of your life, in addition to making you a man.

All is going well in the first game until Permian’s star player, Boobie Miles, tears his ACL.

With the team’s season in jeopardy, the coach, Thornton, who gets paid more than the school principal, becomes public enemy number one in the small, football obsessed town.

Now the team must be carried by a quarterback who believes he’s cursed, a running back that would rather run out of bounds than take a hit, and a defensive end who says maybe 20 words in the entire movie.

Coach Billy Bob must contend with the open, but not very threatening, “warnings” from the town while trying to remake the team into something that can get on the field every week and compete.

Thornton gives the cornerstone performance in this film, but most of the other actors fall flat on their faces.

They seem to either be on one end of the emotional spectrum or the other with a distinct lack of subtlety or no emotion whatsoever.

The worst are the townspeople, who look and act like they were dragged in off the street to have fun yelling at the big Hollywood star.

The script is an exercise in formula. The characters are all typical sports movie clichZs: from the ultra-arrogant Boobie Miles who openly admits to a group of reporters that he’s getting all A’s in school because he plays football to the hard-partying Don Billingsley who has an alcoholic and abusive father, nothing in this film is original.

Even Billy Bob’s pep talks lack any kind of intensity or zeal. The only real and interesting reason to watch this film is to see how depressingly obsessive the people in this Texas town are about high school football.

To anyone who has ever played high school football, just stay home and reminisce, it’ll be a lot more rewarding.