Oliver Stone is not a subtle filmmaker. I haven’t seen a lot of his work, but what little I have seen shows a lot of over-the-top bombast that could arguably be a good forerunner to the likes of Michael Bay and Zach Snyder. When I did the AFI Countdown, he had one on there in the form of Platoon, and though I really like Platoon, it is far from a subtle movie in any way, shape, or form. For something like Platoon or whatever is making Stone angry, that sort of over-the-top emotional resonance might be appropriate to show the director’s mood.
Does that work for football? I seem to recall my brother liked Any Given Sunday when it was still fairly new and on cable, but I never saw all of it. And, like so many seemingly random movies that I put on, it is leaving HBO Max at the end of whatever month I see. Besides, my other option was Revolutionary Road, and I don’t know if I want to watch a movie about divorce right now.
The Miami Sharks football team has a problem: longtime starting quarterback Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid) is at the end of his career, the team is losing, and then he goes down with an injury late in the season with the playoffs on the line. Head coach Tony D’Amato (Al Pacino) sends in the back-up, and he also goes down with an injury the very next play. That leaves perennial third string QB Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx), who after his initial nervousness, becomes the sort of exciting, touchdown throwing improviser that GM/team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz) is really looking for over the more old-fashioned methods favored by Tony. With the sudden success being at odds with Tony’s methods, the coach and his new QB soon clash over whether or not winning or building a cohesive team is more important.
Now, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not much of a sports guy. I do more or less understand the rules of most major sports, including football, but as entertainment, it just doesn’t hold my interest. There are a few sports movies I like, most of them about boxing, but the point stands. As such, part of getting into Any Given Sunday would require me to get into what the movie is selling, namely that football is about modern day gladiators forging a bond with their teammates. And since this is Oliver Stone in the director’s chair (and playing a TV commentator), if you miss that point, it must be because you just stopped paying attention. There’s not much subtext to his work when it’s all text, hammered home during a climactic scene at the halfway point of this 2 hour and 26 minute movie when Tony and Willie argue over winning or camaraderie, the gladiator talk comes in, and the movie cuts between the two actors arguing and the chariot race from Ben-Hur.
It is weird that Tony watches that movie and Charlton Heston has a small role as the league’s commissioner.
However, I ultimately wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the movie. Many scenes give off the sort of “manly man” vibes that seem to exude from films like Conan the Barbarian or The Wolf of Wall Street, movies that always strike me as perhaps trying too hard to be masculine and often come across as a bit immature. That does explain why this movie gives Pancio’s coach a much younger girlfriend who’s just so into some old guy she spots in a bar. Stone does know how to assemble a cast, and beyond the aforementioned actors, there’s still James Woods, Matthew Modine, Aaron Eckhart, Bill Bellamy, LL Cool J, Jim Brown, John C. McGinley, Lawrence Taylor (who actually gets a nice monologue), Ann-Margaret, and Lauren Holly, plus plenty of side plots that don’t have much to do with how Tony clashes both with Christina and Willie.
But was this movie supposed to be a look at football’s darker side with shady doctors, unhelpful sports media, and an obsession with razzle-dazzle over just playing the game well with your comrades, or was it a glorification of the game and the bonds that men (and, let’s face it, it is more about men since the most prominent female character in the movie doesn’t “get it” the way the men do)? At times, it seems both. But in the end, this is still Oliver Stone, and even if the narrative point might be a bit muddled, it still going to be obvious when he makes his points, just as the sun coming out from behind a cloud seems to revive an unconscious and severely injured player on the field. This is football as spectacle in every sense of the word, and that’s the best summary I could come up with for this movie.
Grade: C
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