Starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, and Frank Langella. Rated PG.

Draft Day is a talky, curiously flat movie built around the snooze-fest of the NFL draft. Playing Sonny Weaver Jr., a fictionalized version of the GM for the hapless Cleveland Browns, Kevin Costner is an actor so at ease with sports-themed movies that he instantly endows this non-starter with more credibility than it deserves.

As a football strategist, Junior stands in the shadow of his late father, a long-time coach who’s a legend in Cleveland. He’s being pressured to inject some much-needed excitement into the Browns roster by the team’s glory-hungry owner (Frank Langella in a thankless role). Sonny’s mission? To negotiate his way into drafting a hotshot college quarterback named Bo Callahan (Josh Pence).

The team’s head coach (a seriously miscast Denis Leary) is urging Sonny to draft another player of his choosing. As it turns out, Sonny has some nagging reservations about Bo. He’s not sure the young man has enough character to lead his team. To add to the pressure, Sonny’s coworker and secret girlfriend (Jennifer Garner) has just informed him that she’s pregnant.

It doesn’t take long to sense the kind of mix that director Ivan Reitman is after. He’s aiming for a cross between Moneyball and Jerry Maguire—a sports movie that’s going to satisfy hard-core football geeks while doubling as an inspiring metaphor for the challenges that all of us face in life. Thanks in part to a devastating lack of action, his strategy fails miserably.

The biggest problem here? A cumbersome script where characters spend far too much time haggling over the phone. Weighed down by oppressive amounts of back story, the dialogue feels forced and robotic.

It doesn’t help that Reitman’s gift for casting seems to have deserted him here. Jennifer Garner is completely unconvincing as a savvy executive who supposedly lives and breathes football. Worse yet, there’s virtually no chemistry between Costner and Garner.

Costner’s performance is steady and underplayed. But, like the movie as a whole, it’s remarkably devoid of passion. There’s not even a “why I love the game” speech. Football deserves better. And so do we.