On
Any Given Sunday,
Watch A Real Game Instead
Stone's Football Project Pulls Many Punches But Delivers Few
By David Kozo
NEW YORK (AQB)--First thing's first: Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday is not about the NFL.
Apparently some of the film's seedier elements, such as steroid use and wild parties, were too hot for the No Fun League to handle, so Stone agreed to set his film in the oh-so-fictitious AFFA, giving him free reign to push the boundaries of taste and realism. For a filmmaker already prone to excess, that's the worst thing that could have happened to the film. It ends up being just a lot of noise.
Our heroes, the Miami Sharks, led by coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), are just a few years removed from a championship (called the Pantheon Cup, no joke) but are now on a late-season skid.
Their aging quarterback (Dennis Quaid) has been knocked out for a few weeks, and they must turn to a young journeyman, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), who leads them to a couple of wins. Now everyone's having fun again, and that fun includes plenty of barbecues and frolicking in the sand with babes in bikinis and Bud longnecks. I guess studying game film all night just isn't as photogenic. In the meantime heiress owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) is trying to force Coach D'Amato out by the end of the year while, at the same time, battling the city of Miami for a new stadium.
Stone goes all out on the game sequences, which are well-shot and which sound terrific. The ever-roaming camera is typical Stone fare, as is the stellar cast, especially the strong supporting performances by Aaron Eckhart and Matthew Modine. Of the myriad of ex-players and coaches that pop up in the movie, the standouts are Jim Brown, whose defensive coordinator is in many ways the moral center of the film, and Lawrence Taylor, who plays, fittingly, the dynamic outside linebacker.
But Stone really goes off track in the storytelling. If he wants to make a social commentary about greed and hypocrisy through the lens of one of our nation's most popular forms of entertainment, let him. As a multi-Oscar winner who's made plenty of message films, he's earned the right. Or if he wants to makes a gladiators-of-the-gridiron movie, with good vs. evil and all that, that's fine too. But he tries to do both, and he pulls his punches on both counts.
No important issues are really dealt with seriously; he grazes many surfaces but produces no profound solution or statement. Yet after two-hours-plus of trying to boldly go where no sports movie has gone before, Stone has the audacity to give us the pat Hollywood sports-movie ending. Just think: Instead of Charlie Sheen going to jail at the end of Wall Street, he watches as the Dow soars to a record close, he toasts his newfound riches and gets ready to do it all again the next day. Credits roll.
The credits should have rolled on this ill-fated football project before it got off the ground.
Grade:
D-.
Back
to top
To post
a comment on Dave's review, go to the Speak
Out page.
To e-mail your opinion to Dave, click
here.
Today's Lineup | Sports
Pages | Features | Newsstand
| Sports Links
Speak Out | Mailing
List | Scouting Dept. | About
Us | Home
