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Wild and outrageous, Any Given Sunday gives the viewer a glimpse into an athletic world not too far from the real thing. While some of the scenes were a little too over the top, it proved to be a very enjoyable experience. As a major football fan, I was disappointed in the fact the NFL did not allow Stone to use their logos and stadiums. Oh well, I seemed to enjoy the fictional league even better, even if some of the team uniforms were a dreadful. Jamie Fox portrayed Willie Beamon perfectly, epitomizing the selfish athlete with a cultured ease. While the speed of Beamon's rise proved to be a little too quick, the message in the rise and fall of stardom was more poignant than anything.

Tony D'Amato(Al Pacino) is the head coach of the Miami Sharks who are owned by the Christina Pagniacci(Cameron Diaz) who is using the Miami Franchise only for profit. Trouble stirs up after long time star quarterback Cap Rooney(Dennis Quaid)is injured along with his back up bringing in third string quarterback Willie Beamen(Jamie Foxx) who becomes the face of the franchise after having great game after great game. The only problem is that he plays only with his head and not with his heart, with an aging team that needs an emotional leader to guide them to victory. Also Starring: James Woods, Matthew Modine, LL Cool J, Bill Bellemy, Lawrence Taylor, Charelton Heston, Aaron Eckhart, and John C. McGinley.

In a cinema that rarely produces pro football movies, this is the cream of the crop. It captures the reality along with the heroic story of a nobody rising to the top. The movie is humorous, dramatic, and a thriller for all sports fans.

This is not only one of Oliver Stone's best films but this is also the start of Jamie Foxx's "good" acting career. Forget what the critics said about Collateral or Ray being the beginning for Jamie Foxx. It was Any Given Sunday. Willie Beaman is a complex character and Foxx nailed the part. He was magnificent. He played the part to perfection and out shined the great Al Pacino. The supporting cast was also incredible with great performances from Cameron Diaz, LL Cool J, James Woods, and surprisingly John C. McGinley. It is very rare to find a great dramatic football movie but this is definitely one those small few.

Overall, this is one of the greatest sports movies of all time and it is highly enjoyable for adult audiences.

I highly recommend this movie.

Sports movies are tough to make. Creating the essence of the actual event is the toughest. Most films fall short in the editing process of the event or through sheer carelessness and lack of knowledge. ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is somewhat of an exception. It is hard-hitting and bloody like NORTH DALLAS FORTY. It is actually conventional when you think about it, like a warped RUDY. It is a hell of a lot more realistic than say, NECESSARY ROUGHNESS. These are all football films with varying degrees of success (except ROUGHNESS), but Oliver Stone, in his usual over the top way, throws a dizzying, mind-splitting film at us, much like the sport itself. This is why I liked it.

Oliver Stone began a wicked spell of filmmaking with JFK, evident in its editing style. Fast-paced, black and white mixed with color, documentary-like methods ensued in NATURAL BORN KILLERS, NIXON, and the ghastly U-TURN. Nothing is new here with ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. Football is a battlefield Stone chooses to depict and depict it he does. Even the most ardent fans of the sport do not really know what it is like for a quarterback to drop back and get rid of a piece of pigskin before 11 players maul him. You certainly get the idea watching this.

Al Pacino is the dried up head coach of the fictional Miami Sharks and he barks out the usual coaching cliches you hear in press conferences after real games. Pacino also seems to be sleep-walking through the picture. At times, he appears drunk even when he is not supposed to be. Cameron Diaz's character, a young chick owner, (yeah right) destroys any credibility the film may have had going in (Even the NFL would have nothing to do with this movie). Her constant bickering is so over-done, you almost feel like hurling much the way Jamie Foxx does every time he enters a game as the team's 3rd string quarterback. Realisticly speaking, this is not a very sane film about football. It is a maniacal celebration of the game. The scenes on the field are the ones I cherished. Beware of the locker room or domestic sequences.

No one has ever put such energy into football scenes in a film before. He definitely had some good consultants. There are some comical cameos - Johnny Unitas and Dick Butkus play opposing coaches. Lawrence Taylor can actually act a teeny bit and Jim Brown shares the film's best off the field scene with Pacino in a bar. Stone tries to show us how the game has changed. He resonates past glory with quotes from Lombardi, dissolves showing Red "the Galloping Ghost" Grange, and even Unitas handing off to Ameche. TV has changed everything, says the coach, and he is right. It seems to be all about the money nowadays.

That is the message, but you'll find yourself losing that idea in the lunacy of ANY GIVEN SUNDAY and the bone-crushing, ear-damaging football scenes. They are filmed and cut with such raw intensity, you feel like playing afterwards. This is definitely a film for football fans only unless you like big, sweaty men. Is there a big game at the end that needs to be won? Yes, and this surprised me considering how unconventional Stone usually is. Basically, surrender your senses and thought process to Stone's most entertaining film in quite some time.

RATING: ***

Any Given Sunday is one of Oliver Stone's most enjoyable movies. Sunday is pure entertainment, an action-packed spectacle that will delight even the most ardent sports enthusiast. Stone draws on the usual assortment of sports movie clichés, but he directs his actors, including Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, and LL Cool J, into such passionate and intense performances, that the movie is able to transcend its familiar material. While its 160-minute running time is a bit of a detriment, AGS works overall as a superior piece of escapist entertainment. Also, the locker room scene, which showcases a confrontation between Cameron Diaz and a football player with a giant penis, is a classic.

I don't intend to add to the many positive comments about this movie. I agree with them. But from another perspective:

First, I have never been a football fan. However, any movie that combines Oliver Stone and Al Pacino has to get my interests. I loved it.

One thing that did impress me more than anything else was the quality of the sound design. The 3 dimensional noises in the huddle, on the line, from the grandstands; the growls and other sounds from the players; these things made the movie live and my blood boil. I was breathless.

Then these things interspersed with dead silences and slow motion dreamlike sequences gave the action a spiritual quality.

I stayed for the credits to see who had done this sound work and I think Wylie Stateman will get, at the very least, an Oscar nomination for sound design. If you ever wondered what this credit meant, see this movie and you will know. This movie would have lost a great deal of its punch without that sound designer's talent.

I thought what a great combo for "Any Given Sunday" - Oliver Stone and professional football -- excess meets its match.

So I grabbed a chance to go to the movies with my sons. They got a lot more out of the first and third thirds of the movie that are football games, which I couldn't follow at all, knowing zilch about football so I missed any references to significances of plays and strategies and didn't recognize the zillion football players past and present in bit parts, but I got other visual and music references they didn't.

The football field is explicitly a jungle, with the sounds like an elephant herd crashing. Of course Stone never says or shows once what he can get across 5 times, so the jungle fever point of the primalness of sports as a venue for male violence is accompanied by Native American chants, aboriginal and Asian Indian mystic strains as well. I don't know enough about rap to judge those selections -- I could tell there were lots of lyrics about "niggaz" working for The Man type of thing.

The second third should have appealed to me as that's when the huge ensemble has personal interactions and we learn all their selfish, dastardly, unpleasant motivations, but I was on sensory overload. Example: Al Pacino as the Old Guard Coach calls in Jamie Foxx as the suddenly first string quarterback (in a terrific performance), for a tête a tête on the pro's of Jazz over Rap, as a metaphor of the old football of finesse (what? all those flashbacks to black & white football games were of a subtle sport?). But when Foxx walks in Pacino has "Ben Hur" playing on a wide-screen TV. As if we didn't get the point Foxx actually says "The old gladiators, huh?" If we still didn't get the point the conversation keeps intercutting with the chariot race. And if we still didn't get the point of any reference in the conversation to racial issues then intercuts to the galley slave scenes from "Ben Hur" THEN on top of that, the NFL commissioner who puts the Bitch Owner in her place for trying to play with the Big Old Guys is none other than Charlton Heston.

No one just has a conversation -- everyone shouts, usually at the same time, so I had to close my eyes and I'm not sure if I missed something.

This is Sunbelt Football of expansion teams where the sport is not a Fall/Winter season - so the women were everywhere in tank tops, cleavage, midriffs bare and hips swinging, even Cameron Diaz as the Bitch Owner. Though all the women are really high priced prostitutes (even usually sweet Lauren Holly is a hardened cold Football Wife).

What I don't think I missed was Stone's outsize determination to ignore the homo-erotic aspects of male sports violence that "Fight Club" reveled in. Aw come on Stone, not a single gay player in the closet? He crowds the behemoths into locker rooms and showers that can barely contain their bodies--but he's so afraid of showing them in contact that he even at one point has one throw a baby alligator into the shower so they scatter.

Everyone is criticized-- including the sportscasters, which Stone revels in playing one (I think in general this movie is a show down between Stone and Spike Lee as it takes on more racial issues than he's done in the past). What a coincidence that ESPN is continually bad-mouthed when there's a big legible credit at the end to Turner Sports Network when this is a Time Warner movie and ESPN's a competitor.

Stone of course goes out of his way to link football with war, to fit into his oeuvre, with battle quotes from Vince Lombardi and some sort of link with Pacino's father dying in WWII that was irrelevant it seemed to me.

I think this is Dennis Quaid's at least third football movie and in the genre of such movies as "North Dallas 40," "Longest Yard," "Great American Hero," etc. and this joins that pantheon as a terrific football movie.

The music selections were by Robbie Robertson (with Paul Kelly but I'm not sure which Kelly that is) and he did as seamless a job as he's done for Martin Scorcese. The music credits at the end were impossible to read -- in 3 columns of a vertical font that was like watching the credits on TV - plus the movie continues under the credits so all those who bolted missed the ending.

Professional football deserves to be Oliver Stoned. But if I never saw any more football that'll be fine with me.

(originally written 12/27/1999)

Oliver Stone would have you believe that his Any Given Sunday is the most realistic film depiction of professional football, both on and off the field. On the field Stone does capture much of the excitement and passion which makes people love the sport. He also is probably reasonably accurate with much of his depiction of the off-field excesses of our modern-day gladiators. But both on and off the field he probably goes a little too far. He pushed it a little beyond the point of realism and believability. Modern professional football is a grand spectacle but perhaps Stone made it just a little too grand for this movie's good.

With Stone laying bare some brutal truths the NFL was never going to have anything to do with this movie. So the story follows the fictional Miami Sharks of the fictional AFFA. Their veteran coach Tony D'Amato has had a distinguished career but has the game passed him by? The team's owner certainly thinks so. Oh, by the way that owner, Christina Pagniacci, is played by Cameron Diaz. Cameron Diaz owns a football team? OK then. Well, it turns out daddy died and left his daughter the team. And Christina is no shrinking violet. She is driven and determined. Which is a nice way of saying she's a bitch. When she isn't making her coach's life miserable she's trying to blackmail Miami's mayor for a new stadium. She thinks she's in control but does anyone really respect her? The answer to that question may well disappoint her. Meanwhile his raving shrew of an owner is far from Tony's only problem. In the first game we see the Sharks lose their star veteran quarterback to injury. And then lose his backup. Enter Willie Beamen. And all hell breaks loose.

In no time at all Beamen goes from anonymous third-string quarterback to superstar. Really, I mean no time at all. Sorry Mr. Stone but I don't care how well you play you don't go from complete unknown to having your own rap video and your picture on the side of every bus in town in two weeks. Just one clear instance of the movie not really ringing true. Anyhow, Beamen's winning games and exciting fans but he's driving his coach and teammates nuts. He ignores the coach, makes up his own plays, does it all his way. And despite his success he ends up tearing his team apart. The coach sees this happening and tries to rein Beamen in but it's a futile effort. Especially when the owner doesn't back the coach. The Sharks are now winning games but there's conflict all over the place. Everyone's got their own agenda. The owner, the coach, the players, the doctors, everyone's pulling in their own direction. This seems destined for a spectacular blowup.

Stone has a great ensemble cast but there are two roles clearly more important than the rest. The movie is at its heart about two men, Coach Tony D'Amato and "Steamin" Willie Beamen. Al Pacino plays the coach and is as good as you would expect. A little over the top in some moments but the whole movie goes a little over the top in many moments. And Pacino is very good in the quieter moments such as heart-to-hearts with his two quarterbacks, the aging star and the young hotshot. Speaking of that young hotshot Jamie Foxx plays Beamen and captures all the character's excesses wonderfully while also conveying the hurt and frustration of a guy who never felt he was given a fair shot in football or in life. It's Pacino and Foxx who really have to carry the movie and they do a very good job of it. But they have plenty of support. Diaz is surprisingly effective in a role which certainly does not seem tailor-made for her. Dennis Quaid, James Woods, Matthew Modine, Aaron Eckhart, Ann-Margret...the list goes on and on. Notable performers who all add something to the film. There's also room for real-life football stars. Jim Brown we already knew could act. Lawrence Taylor is a pleasant surprise. He plays an old, broken-down linebacker facing the end of his career and his own personal demons. So basically, LT's playing himself. And he handles that very well.

So the cast is generally excellent and the story's entertaining enough so why is there the nagging sense that the movie's not quite as good as it could have been? One problem is the football action. Stone takes you right onto the field, capturing the sound and fury. But he goes too far. Realism takes a back seat as we're presented with a lot of rather cartoonish football, guys doing full-twisting double somersaults into the end zone and such. The game is exciting enough as is, Stone didn't need to crank it up past the point of truth. And a lot of the off the field stuff goes a little too far as well. There's a lot of craziness and excess. Our on-field warriors are wild men off the field. A little too wild at times to take the movie seriously. And then there's the central plot point, Beamen's rise to instant superstardom. The media makes stars quickly but not that quickly. It's just not really believable. Coach D'Amato tells us football is a game of grabbing that last inch. Any Given Sunday comes close but when we stretch out the chains it comes up just that inch short.

What a disappointment. Oliver Stone, Al Pacino and football. What a great movie THAT should be. "Should be" doesn't mean "IS", however. Unfortunately, Stone's flashy (and yes, impressive) shots of the the game are not enough to solidify this unfocused movie. The movie is wrought with too many music-videos and shallow characters to whom we cannot relate. If Stone wanted to make "Rudy part II" he should have concentrated more on the characters, and if he was looking for "MTV does the NFL" he shouldn't have wasted our time even introducing half of the characters. But he ends up in the middle here, with a mish-mash of football-music-videos and underdeveloped characters who have mysterious and quick attitude changes just in time to win a playoff game. The greatest let-down is that the great rebel Oliver Stone sells out and gives us a Rudy ending, without making us care for anyone like we cared about Rudy. Of course we have lots of sentimentality about the past, sure. You want to talk about the past, Mr. Stone? Remember Platoon and JFK? I do.

Oliver Stone is one of the most, if not THE most, passionate filmmakers working today. He's also a talented filmmaker, which a lot of people seem to forget. When both his talent and passion are at full strength, the results are impressive(SALVADOR, PLATOON, JFK, NIXON). When the passion is still there, but the talent is tripped up by his passion and ambitions, he makes flawed movies which are still powerful(WALL STREET, TALK RADIO, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, HEAVEN AND EARTH). But when he goes outside of his passions, for either experiments(NATURAL BORN KILLERS), or to make "mainstream" movies(U-TURN), he misses wide. NATURAL BORN KILLERS, to me, was a worse film, but U-TURN was, in a way, even more dispiriting, because the former you could at least excuse as an experiment gone wrong, whereas the latter screamed "Cash-in!" You felt after watching Stone was too tired to fight anymore.

Well, as ANY GIVEN SUNDAY proves, Stone, like his on-screen alter-ego, Tony D'Amato(Al Pacino), may look tired, but he's still got fight left in him. Many have seen football as war, so it's appropriate Stone has long wanted to make a movie about football. And as Spike Lee did with HE GOT GAME, Stone wants us to see not only the glory of the actual playing(as well as how tough it is to earn that glory), but also the corrupt forces which are pervading it today. After all, we decry flashy players, and then complain about those who are too boring, we talk about tradition out of one side of our mouth and demand the game be updated out of the other side, we call white players who exhibit boorish behavior "colorful" while calling black players who exhibit similar behavior "punks"(and that's putting it mildly), we complain about players who are overpaid while thinking nothing of owners who spend lavishly on themselves and move teams around, we complain about football being too dominated by TV yet sit around like couch potatoes every Sunday and Monday night, we react with horror when players get hurt badly and get addicted to drugs, yet we yell at them to murder each other on the field and call those who don't chicken(to put it mildly), and so on.

This is a wide canvas to cover, and yet Stone does a pretty good job of it. Especially good is how the relationship between D'Amato and his new quarterback Willie Beamon(Jamie Foxx) encompasses a lot of that canvas. There are two scenes in particular which stand out; one where D'Amato sits with Willie on the plane and tries to talk to him, but can't think of anything which doesn't sound patronizing from Willie's point of view(like music, where D'Amato thinks the fact he's mentioning black jazz musicians is supposed to mean something), and the scene at D'Amato's house, where Beamon talks of how, in the past, "playing for the team" was code for "Know your place, boy," and have things really changed? Willie has to learn that playing for the team really does mean, as quarterback, getting them to respect you so they'll play for you, and Tony has to learn that tradition can't be stodgy, that it has to accept change.

Stone is less sure in other aspects. Cameron Diaz does a good job as the team's owner, but her character is a little too one-dimensional at times. It would have been more interesting to have here not just talk in terms of money, but that the game, to her, really is more interesting the way Willie plays it(maybe I'm biased, but I'm a fan of more pass-oriented games). And while I don't think Stone is as misogynist as he's been charged with in the past, certainly it's evident here. It's one thing to say there are groupies in football, it's another thing to delight in showing them. There are sympathetic woman here, particularly Ann-Margaret as Diaz's mother, who shows what being a football wife costs, and Lela Rochon as Willie's girlfriend, who is unwilling to have that happen to her(the scene at the party, where she feels both isolated from Willie and the other wives, is nicely drawn). Finally, Stone can't resist the ROCKY-type cliches near the end.

But though it's flawed, there's still a lot of power here. Except for Lauren Holly, who I'm not a big fan of, the acting is all around excellent, particularly Foxx. I was particularly impressed with how well the athletes did as actors, particularly Jim Brown(though he's an actor, so this isn't surprising) and Lawrence Taylor. And, of course, all the football scenes are terrific and feel real. It's always good when you see on screen what you can't see watching the game on TV, and Stone accomplishes that here. Call it not quite a touchdown, but a film which convinces us Stone still has fight left in him.

If you've ever seen more than three Oliver Stone-directed movies, they all start to look and feel the same. You can tell one without even seeing the credits. He is not really interested in how you feel or how his characters feel so his movies are usually very entertaining but emotionally barren.

This epic is no exception. It did not matter a damn to me what happened to anyone in the movie, which is unfortunate since you are spending over 2 1/2 hours with these people.

Too many scenes are redundant - Al getting wasted at the course of his life, at least three/four times? He was starting to remind me of "Scarface" and I was waiting for a speech to go along with his misery. OK, I get it, he's discontent. I don't need a brick wall to fall on me to get that point across.

Of the gigantic cast, only Dennis Quaid actually looks like a football player. Jamie Foxx has some great moments and some not so great. I thought Al Pacino was wildly miscast but it was great to see him again, and I enjoyed a couple of his scenes with Ann-Margret. Cameron Diaz was completely one-note, as was James Woods and Lauren Holly. Lela Rochon comes off best out of the 'wives/girlfriends' contingent.

This is not a big deal, but it kind of bothered me...at one point, Al is watching "Ben-Hur" and you get to see several scenes from that movie, including star Charlton Heston. Later in the movie, Heston shows up as the Commissioner! Granted, he's forty years older now, but still...was Gregory Peck too busy? Its a three minute cameo, someone else should be been hired to avoid the distraction.

But if you're not that excited about the movie you're watching, something like this can give you something to think about, though.

Any Given Sunday (1999)

Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, LL Cool J, James Woods, Matthew Modine, Lawrence Taylor, Jim Brown, John C. McGinley, Aaron Eckhart, Charlton Heston, Oliver Stone, Elizabeth Berkley. Directed by Oliver Stone. Spoilers herein.

"Any Given Sunday" is a film that is a feast for the eyes, but not the mind. Stone does a great job for creating a dizzying direction, eye-opening visuals, and extremely loud sound, and he does all of this with the 2 and a half+ hours that he has to spare with the film but never does go deep into detail on the characters.

The story consists of a professional football team struggling with their season. The film opens with a quote from football legend Vince Lombardi, and then fades into a football game, where the starting quarterback for the Sharks, Jack Rooney is hurt in the middle of a game, unknown third string quarterback Willie Beaman is sent in for the rest of the season. As Beaman starts rising to fame, aging Coach D'Amato and Rooney begin to question if Beaman is worth risking the rest of the season and their chance for the championship as he is trying to make the team win by himself.

The performances are pretty good and powerful. Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx do great with the lead characters, and other familiar faces such as Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, LL Cool J, Matthew Modine and John C. McGinley in the supporting performances.

One thing I did really like about "Any Given Sunday" is how the action during the games is very realistic, gritty, and fast. It ultimately captures the intensity and hard work from the sport of Football. But like "Natural Born Killers" and "U Turn", the sound is so unbearably loud and images are so fast and dizzying that the film could give some viewers a headache. Stone has been known to cause controversy among his films, and this is a way that he seems to do it, but it didn't bother me so much as haters of the film. Despite of some of the strengths, "Any Given Sunday" does have a few flaws. The film is unnecessarily overlong, overly stylish, and underdeveloped. Stone really could have made the film about 20-30 minutes shorter, and with most of the time the characters are either playing on the game field or yelling at each other. Some scenes showing Willie's rise are no more interesting than a Nike Gridiron commercial or a Michael Bay film. Another thing Stone forgets to do is add emotion to the film, and he replaces that with mostly sports action.

Overall I really did enjoy this film a lot, for it's realistic football scenes and the living hell that the players go through in order to win. But at times it really does try too hard, especially when it's absent with a great script and follows clichés of older Football (or even gladiator) films. But I would recommend it to Stone fans and football fans especially. A very considerate 4 stars out of 5.

When you look at the cast of this film. You realize that had it been expertly directed It could have been really great. The biggest problem with the film was Stone's insistence on using frantic cinematography, and frantic editing in order to give you a sense of the intensity of the game. What it ends up doing is just giving you this rather incomprehensible mishmash. As a viewer you barely know what's going on. At any given moment, much less any given Sunday. It's a decent film considering the fact that Stone hasn't done much good work for the last two decades. It's, you know, probably up there with Alexander, an maybe Nixon in terms of decent work. It's passable entertainment, that is about as far it's about as I would go.

I think the movie as a whole was excellent. Oliver Stone did a great job, I felt as though I was inside the screen. The almost 3 hours didn't even feel like it, it felt like watching a Football game on Any Given Sunday. Jamie Foxx did a great job, you loved him at times and hated him at times, and he gave you great reason to do either. And of course Al Pacino was the man as always, playing a coach with heart and blowing you away at the end. Cameron Diaz was the best wicked witch, just a hard-core display of a woman of the millenium. All in all, anyone who thinks this movie had no plot, wasn't paying attention. All you have to do is see the change in the characters throughout the movie, and what the game meant to each one of them: from the owner, to the coach, to the players, to the doctors, to the families. Perfect example is the characters of both Ann Margaret and Lauren Holly. There is a lot of meaning in this movie. Kudos!

Every American Football cliché and issue and moment of heroism is thrown together in one bone crunching tackle of a movie. This is one fired up, drug enhanced super financed player of a movie. This is the touchdown! The games are played in a confused and confusing maelstrom of noise and sound. The players are larger than life both off and on the field. At no time do we see the crack in the war-paint. This is a full on movie. Compelling, exciting and completely daft. Failing miserably at the same time as succeeding heroically. Thoroughly enjoyable!

An interesting perspective of what happens behind the scenes in professional sports. It's definitely a more edgy and hard outlook and it's entertaining to watch. It does suffer from an overall structure standpoint and is too long but still a solid watch.

Let me start by saying that i dont like or even understand american football and i personally think it does not come close to soccer but with this film it did not matter a jot. Oliver Stone had directed a film here that crosses all bounderies. You dont have to like the sport or understand it to appreciate how brilliant this film is. It is shot so well ,it makes you fell you are in the game and as for the soundtrack well that just adds to a mesmerising showpiece. Stars such as Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid,James Woods and Cameron Diaz star but for me the real Star of this film is James Foxx who plays the Quaterback who begins to believe his own hype but ultimately understands that it the team that matters. One of the test of a good film is that if you start to look at the clock throughout the film is usually means its not good , this film lasted 2 and a half hours and i never looked at the time. Brilliant. 9 out of 10.

Somewhere I read that (Oliver Stone) has mixed 3 screenplays in one to make (Any Given Sunday). When you watch the movie, you can see that.

(Stone) is a knight among Hollywood directors. He fights the American system and foundations burningly and unstoppably. You have to notice his basic creed through nearly all of his works; he was fierily against the military foundation in (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven & Earth), the political and economical foundation (JFK, Nixon, Wall Street), the media foundation (Natural Born Killers), so why not to take on the sport foundation as well. However, this time, something was not bad, but too much. It was really about to be too-much-it's-bad!

We have a movie about a noble man against a system (values vs. Money), a movie about a coach and a player (team vs. Self), and a third one about a team that had to survive despite its own breakdown. (Stone) didn't want to lose any part of the big picture he was drawing, trying his best to present all the story lines, the satire, and the bitter details that he could tell about such a "world". And the result is an intensive movie, but so heavy. I had to watch it 3 times to catch on its treat in complete.

True that (Stone) managed to gather a lot of things by his distinct style without being adolescently manipulative or showy, but nothing can deny that the final product gives you the fatigue. There are almost 10 characters with hot drama and something to satirize also; I guess the characterization was such an exhausting job for the writers here. So sometimes you feel that this is an abbreviated TV series in strenuous 150 minutes (which feels like longer than that!). Yes, the editing tried to collect the many pieces, keep the (Stone) flavor, and maintain a fast paced movie in the same time, though it's nothing but a violent long video clip in many places. Now and then, it forces you to lose any concentration you have.

The sense to speak omnisciently and deeply ruined somehow the desire to be that watchable movie. While delivering its good case and commentary, it - somehow - forfeits its balance as a drama. Hence the movie's identity is torn between being a simple story about how the "team" is more important that the "self", and being an epic about deadly tyrannical modern empire that makes the gladiators to kill them.

Unlike many movies that have similar problems, (Any Given Sunday) isn't slothful, but of course thick, with a director who refuses to cut much of what he says. Till now, I can't believe how (James Caviezel) and (Tom Sizemore) played roles that were eventually deleted, which means that this movie would've been something like 3 hours long already. Look at the closing credits displaying on the last 10 minutes; obviously they didn't want to make it any longer, so they put them while a very serious event at the very end, which has been badly appeared because of this kind of dealing.

Anyway, it needs to be watched more than once to be fully understood, so to relish its own kind of enjoyment, and its real profound metaphors. (Stone) was right about so many issues here, but he wasn't right only when it came to making an engaging graceful movie out of wide wild Film. He succeeded in that brilliantly before, for instance in (Wall Street). But, here, the dose gave me an impressive headache. Watch it 3 times to experience well the 3 movies that it is. 3 smart ones by the way, but weren't made smartly in one.

There's no way this film has ever been anything less than a 10. From the first time I watched it in 1999 to tonight in 2019. Pacino is amazing, the script and direction is amazing. Soundtrack amazing. Supporting cast (Diaz, ll cool j, foxx, woods, modine, mcginley, etc etc etc) amazing. And the speech, if you don't know it even without having seen the film then you are neither a sports or motivational speech fan

I saw this when it came out in 1999. I saw it last week again because I found the screenplay and read it. It was after reading the screenplay and then watching the movie again that I fully grasped what Stone was trying to tell me with this film.

The core of the film is that the game has been poisoned by money, greed and power. Player's play on steroids or Demoral. Pride and ego get in the way. Groupies and drugs are attractive pitfalls. Nothing new you'd say, but the way Stone exposes the game of contemporary football to us is so unnerving it's just hard to believe these people are our heroes, our modern-day gladiators. I never looked the same at the game.

As usual Stone casts newcomers (Foxx, Diaz) and puts them against solid actors (Pacino, Woods, Modine). He gets the maximum out of Foxx, but Diaz is just a bit out of her league. She tries, but fumbles in the end-zone. I loved the fact that Stone gave Berkley a role in a major studio film. Nobody wanted to touch her after Showgirls. But Stone did. I love that guy.

Stone is a master of a form that Tony Scott is not: fast and heavy, MTV-style cutting with steadycam and held-camera work. Only Stone can do this the right way. But you can see that Stone doesn't have the help of Robert Richardson, his DP since Platoon. It's not bad, but different.

Anyway, this film is (in the tradition like North Dallas 40) a true piece of sport cinema. Sentimental, but filled with terrific dialogue, great actors and action. Oliver Stone may not be the renegade he was, but he still is one of the best directors in Hollywood.

When Oliver Stone isn't flaunting wild conspiracy theories, he actually gets down to the business of making some really good films. And Any Given Sunday is definitely one of those.

It's a difficult perspective for me to write about this movie as my favorite spectator sport is baseball rather than football. But the business end of it is virtually the same. Curiously enough I was in Miami last week and saw the Florida Marlins home opener. They are going through some of the same dealings with the Miami city fathers about a new stadium that you see Cameron Diaz having with Clifton Davis in this film. There's a possibility that Miami will not have its major league baseball franchise soon.

Cameron Diaz is the young owner of the Miami Sharks professional football team who inherited it from her late father who is described as one of the prominent owners in the sport, a kind of combination of Wellington Mara and George Halas. Her father gave Coach Al Pacino complete latitude to deal with his players, but Cameron is taking George Steinbrenner as her role model.

Al Pacino joins the ranks of players who have done outstanding portrayals of athletic coaches. It's an honorable tradition going back to Pat O'Brien as Knute Rockne. I'm not sure how Rockne would have done in the era of seven figure salaries, but Pacino is adapting the best way he can.

When I was a kid in NYC in the fifties following our three major league baseball teams, one of the great constants was Casey Stengel winning that American League pennant for the New York Yankees with Yogi Berra behind the plate. The catcher's job is similar to the quarterback's in football in that he sees the whole game and actually sets the pace in calling the pitches. As Yogi's skills deteriorated over time, Casey could never quite pull the plug on him as the regular catcher. As a result, Elston Howard who would have been a regular on any other team never amassed the statistics that probably would have put him in the Hall of Fame.

Pacino has that kind of dilemma here. A veteran quarterback in Dennis Quaid and an up and coming talent in Jamie Fox. Quaid's skills are deteriorating, but he has the heart of a warrior which Pacino tells him in my favorite moment in the film. And the lesson Fox learns from Pacino and Quaid is that if the team doesn't respect you, you don't lead winners. And winning is the bottom line.

There are a whole lot of good performances here in minor roles, the hallmark of a great film. James Woods as the slimy team doctor, Ann-Margret as Cameron Diaz's mother, LL Cool J as a defensive lineman who may have taken one hit too many. And what a casting coup Oliver Stone pulled off in getting Charlton Heston for a small role as the football commissioner. Who better to run professional football than the guy who brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai.

I think even non-sports fans can appreciate this film.

"Any Given Sunday" is a movie about pro football and it's directed by Oliver Stone. It's an unusual topic for Stone, that's for sure...but he handles it well.

The film is about a pro team, the Miami Sharks. The team is good but struggling lately. However, an end to their doldrums appears in the form of their third-string quarterback (Jamie Foxx). However, this quarterback also has the distinction of rubbing his teammates the wrong way, as his ego is definitely an issue. Will they make it to the playoffs after all?

The film is sort of like a behind the scene look at football...warts and all. I appreciate how the film talks about debilitating injjuries and head trauma, though it's incredibly ironic that the player who is particularly struggling with this is played by Lawrence Taylor, as guy who in real life seems like the poster child for Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

All in all, very well made and worth seeing. My only complaint is that the film is in some ways quite predictable...though well acted.

The entire movie was an uncoordinated, unintelligible, totally detached series of 10 second scenes with constant closeup of all characters just mouthing words.

There was no recognizable plot, and no beginning or ending, just a mish-mash of useless diatribe and unbelievable football "action".