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Hmmm. Oliver Stone does a football movie. Geez, this bit will practically write itself:
"Fourth and long, no time-outs left. Short play-action pass is caught at the 40, he shakes off a tackle, to the 45, picks up a block, he's at mid-field with room to run -- to the 40, the 30 -- and nobody's gonna catch him now! He's at the 20 -- was that a car backfiring? -- the 10 -- there's a little puff of smoke hanging over the grassy knoll in the end zone -- AND HIS HEAD EXPLODED! Looks like a flag on the play…"
Set a couple years from now, Any Given Sunday follows a few critical weeks in the late season of the Miami Sharks (apparently the rapture has come, and every NFL player who ever took time to "thank Almighty God" during an interview was actually sincere enough to get spirited away, since not only are all the teams new, but even the league is different; the same sponsors -- Reebok, MetRx, etc. -- are still around though, from which I guess we're to infer that everybody in advertising is going to Hell). Al Pacino plays Tony D'Amato, the team's once-idolized head coach who's seen better days. Now, after a three-game losing streak threatens playoff hopes, veteran franchise-anchoring quarterback Jack Rooney (Dennis Quaid) and his backup are injured on consecutive plays. D'Amato has to put in "Steamin'" Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), a scrambling third-stringer halfway through a mediocre career, whose anxiety at finally getting a break quickly prompts a new statistical category: yards per vomit.
But Willie becomes an unexpected breakout hero, much to the delight of the team's general manager Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) (?!), who inherited the post when her dad, the owner, died, and her mother (Ann-Margaret) (!?), the lush, didn't have the heart to sell. Christina is a Fortune postergrrrl with an agenda of her own, playing both ends by courting Los Angeles for a move while trying to squeeze a new stadium out of Miami. Meanwhile, Rooney is getting pressure from his shrewish wife (Lauren Holly) to suck it up and get back in the game even if it cripples him; the Dr. Frankenstein team surgeon (James Woods) and his annoyingly ethical assistant (Matthew Modine) battle over whether certain players should continue to be chemically stoked for one more playoff try, even if it means they might wind up shrink-wrapped in the produce counter; and Beaman's belatedly stroked ego has him fighting a turf battle with D'Amato for leadership of the Sharks' roster of psychos, mutants, and sociopaths.
Stone has a penchant for slick, well-choreographed mythologizing, whether it concern combat (Platoon), greed (Wall Street), mass murder (Natural Born Killers), or megalomania (Nixon). So you know some heavy-handed symbolism is bound to accompany a subject as bigger-than-life as football. What you may not be ready for is having virtually every sequence either punctuated by lightning, as if Zeus were calling the play-by-play, or intercut with scenes from the chariot race in Ben Hur (Charlton Heston even shows up in a cameo as football commissioner). The result is something that the most dedicated post-industrial gridiron fans, inured to the de rigeur rapcore bumpers that mercilessly punctuate NFL games these days, may appreciate: a three-hour, facemask-grabbing, lettin'-it-dangle-in-the-locker-room, ground-zero gladiatorial music video for Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba." But for everyone else, this attempt at epic fable is little more than a cortisone-shot, shaky-cam PC soap opera -- the plays do look good, if not the entire games, which are nearly always scripted too predictably in movies -- about how black and white people can get along on the playing field if nowhere else. He was aiming for Homer (the Greek poet, not the "Simpsons" dad), but what he hit was "Days of Our Linebackers." And in the end, one-time bad-boy Oliver Stone wimps out big time, letting everybody make nice and sail into the sunset.
If there's anything superficially interesting about Any Given Sunday, it's seeing real-life football legends such as Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown, Johhny Unitas, and Dick Butkus fill out the ranks of supporting characters. But you can get the same thing from reruns of "Coach," with the luxuries of being able to turn the volume down and not being made to feel quite so physically inadequate. C-
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