Any Given Sunday

For the first 30 minutes of this film I understood about 5 words of dialogue, two of which were “fuck you”. The good news is that my comprehension rate got better and so did the film although it would help greatly if you were a fan of grid-iron, or rugby league, or at least football, none of which am I.

With a tip-top cast, Stone’s dynamic directing and a reasonable script by he and John Logan (who went on to be an A -list specialist in heroism with Gladiator, The Last Samurai and The Aviator on his C.V.), Any Given Sunday turns out to be a pretty good example of the standard sports movie with its how-they-goin’-do-it? narrative arc although Stone seriously challenges one’s faith for at least the first half of the film.

Al Pacino plays Tony D'Amato, the coach of the Miami Sharks, a once top professional football team who are on a losing streak. Cameron Diaz is the owner, a job she inherited from her deceased dad. She blames D'Amato and his No.1 player (Dennis Quaid) for being too old. The team’s offensive coordinator (Aaron Eckhart) and Jamie Foxx, the hot-shot rookie agree. D'Amato wants them all off his back and meanwhile things in the locker rooms are turning to crap as the team doctor (James Woods) is risking players lives in order to get more games out of them.

The first 30 minutes of the film are given up to a match and a portrait of the players’ sex-and-drugs off-field lifestyle before Diaz is introduced and something remotely intelligible occurs. Why Diaz? No apparent reason for she’s barely credible as a hard-assed bitch destroying D'Amato’s old school, team-player style that was the rule in her dad’s day. Anyway, Pacino hold our attention with his familar strung-out-workaholic-world-weary-older-guy-with-a-divorce-that-he’s-never-gotten-over-and-a-fondness-for–the-booze character and the support cast are all solid with a small but strong role for Woods.

Gradually the drama starts to win us over as the film settles into the aforementioned “underdog” template. Stone has recourse to some bizarre editing, at one stage inserting extended shots from Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston actually turns up later in Stone’s movie although in modern garb), part of the far-from-subtle exposition of the movie’s themes, this one being that the players are “gladiators” (see above re. Logan). As a representation of professional football Any Given Sunday is quite credible but nowhere as interesting as its running time would suggest.

FYI: Stone appears as a TV commentator. The Australian DVD release has a runtime of 151m.

 

Want something different?