IMDB Rating: 6.50, 29420 votes |
Taglines
When a devastating hit knocks a professional football legend and quarterback Cap Rooney (Denis Quaid) out of the game, a young, unknown third-stringer is called in to replace him. Having ridden the bench for years because of a string of bad luck stories and perhaps insufficient character, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx) seizes what may be his last chance, and lights up the field with a raw display of athletic prowess. His stunning performance over several games is so outstanding and fresh it seems to augur a new era in the history of this Miami franchise, and forces aging coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) to reevaluate his time-tested values and strategies and begin to confront the fact that the game, as well as post-modern life may be passing him by. Adding to the pressure on D'Amato to win at any cost is the aggressive young President/Co-owner of the team, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), now coming into her own after her father's death. Christina's driving desire to prove herself in a male dominated world is intensified by her focus on the marketing and business of football, in which all coaches and players are merely properties.Actors
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Genres
- Action (662)
- Adventure (393)
- Animation (104)
- Biography (56)
- Comedy (853)
- Crime (450)
- Documentary (15)
- Drama (1116)
- Family (199)
- Fantasy (254)
- Film-Noir (1)
- History (41)
- Horror (359)
- Music (49)
- Musical (44)
- Mystery (199)
- Romance (366)
- Sci-Fi (243)
- Short (11)
- Sport (66)
- Thriller (855)
- War (79)
- Western (50)
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Year
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13 Comments
not my idea of entertainment
Careful!….If jumpy camera work bothers you…think twice.
great movie
Cool plays and good performance from Al Pacino and Jamie Fox.
I was very impressed - and I don’t even like football that much!
After you get used to the documentary type style, you can really get into this movie. ( I especially liked seeing Johnny Unitas starring as a coach. )
For those of you who left when the credits began- oops- you really missed a very crucial part of the story!
I liked the football sequences and seeing Pacino mouth off as usual…
This movie has been getting mixed reviews, and rightfully so. While watching this movie it was hard for me to determine what Stone was trying to get across. He covered issues that owners, players, coaches and reporters have to deal with in professional football. The only people he didn’t cover were the refs.
I am a football fan, so I did enjoy the football sequences, and there are a lot of them, but I did not care for the camera tricks.
There were a lot of cameo appearances from ex and present football players and its always fun to pick out cameos, although I am disappointed that Deion didn’t make an appearance.
If you like football, wait for video, but don’t read into it.
Good football scenes + terrible other scenes = average movie.
Oliver Stone took went a little nuts with his direction. The style works well for on-field action, but it should have stayed there. Almost every scene in the movie is shot in some strange way. I like the football, but hated the endlessly drawn-out character conflicts which were over-dramatized.
This movie was painful…
I seriously left the theater with a headache. There were football inconsistencies, some unnecessary scenes between Dennis Quaid & Lauren Holly, and just poor flow in the movie. I love football movies, but this one is even worse than Necessary Roughness…Wait for video, if you have to see it.
lots of action.Depicted what an athelete might go through.
I love football but this movie was awful.
If there was a point to it, I didn’t get it. It dragged on and on and on!! Oliver Stone trying to be artsy and heavy with a movie about football did not work and was just painful to watch. Don’t see this movie unless someone pays you the $7.50 and even then, think about it!
Goes deeper than a simple football movie…
But some people may not appreciate the more complex lives of the individuals. Not much of a chick movie though. Guys will appreciate it much more, but isn’t quite as good as Fight Club.
Eh… on second thought, it was still decent, but not that great.
too much hype, you dont really care for any of the characters at all.
STONED EXTREMES
When it comes to Oliver Stone movies, they can either run hot or cold but, at least, you are riveted by the images, the sounds, and the persuasive performances. Oliver Stone’s newest film, "Any Given Sunday," an epic parable about football, has lots of visual razzle-dazzle to spare, plenty of bone-crushing sound effects, and some temporarily persuasive performances. It is also a complete comedown from the director, a relentlessly torpid mishmash of montages within montages that will make you want to take some Valium to relieve the massive headache you will get.
Al Pacino stars as Tony D’Amato, a veteran football coach of the fictional Miami Sharks, who drinks too much, hollers too much, screws around with prostitutes, and is getting too old for the game. A spoiled, bratty rich girl, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), the late team owner’s daughter, starts telling Tony to "hold it together, you bull-headed moron!" She wants control of the game, but in more economic terms. Tony also has a young star quarterback, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), who is egoistic, has no team spirit, and is certain that the game is his. He replaces the older, injured Jack "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid), who faces a wife (Lauren Holly) that demands he continue playing the game for another couple of years.
In fact, there are many characters in "Any Given Sunday," but so few are given more than a few minutes onscreen at a time. The cast is eclectic (James Woods, Ann-Margret, Matthew Modine, Jim Brown, Elizabeth Berkley) but there are only traces of them. That leaves us with Pacino, an excellent actor, who is given shards of a character to play, but without any depth or dimension. Cameron Diaz does as well as she can, but like everyone else, she sort of drifts in and out of the frame barely making an impression. This is akin to watching football on television, the cast resembles nothing more than stick figures in Stone’s arena.
The biggest problem lies with the editing. Stone has assembled footage in extraordinary shifts of mood and excitement in films such as "J.F.K," "Natural Born Killers," and "U-Turn," but here, it is the shift of one close-up shot after another in rapid succession. This often feels like super MTV, shots and whole sequences are so choppily edited that they leave a feeling of gradual disorientation. The worst of it is during the actual football games. Instead of showing us the mechanics and strategies of playing between the offense and defense, we get close-ups of bodies flying through the air, lots of physical poundings and flips, and twisting footballs, but no sense that any of this is being played on the field. In other words, we never get a panoramic sense of the field itself, and so everything is a blur, leaving us wondering as to what exactly is happening on screen. To top it off, there are numerous montages within montages, clouds speeding through the horizon, and the usual moonlight shots, which Stone has shown us before. All this is draining to watch, and one loses interest quickly.
It is also hard to judge the actors in the film since they are cut-and-pasted in such randomness that Stone barely lets a take run longer than three seconds. A theme is hidden somewhere in this mess about how football players have no education and have nothing else to offer besides great games and reaping in lots of profits. But all is lost in Stone’s grandiose style that, for the first time in his career, has no true rhyme or reason (celebrityism and lifestyles of the players, not to mention physical abuses of their bodies, are given minimal exposure). The overall effect is blurry, and casts a pale shadow of the once great Oliver Stone.