As exciting as the game...

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2011)

American football coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) is a man with problems: his team have lost four games in a row and the boss (Cameron Diaz) is pressuring him into dropping his trusty old war-horse (Dennis Quaid); D'Amato's wife has left him; he's drinking too much; his team medic (James Woods) is overdosing the players on pain-killing drugs and ignoring incipient health problems which could result in (gulp) paralysis; and the one ray of hope – an unexpectedly impressive player (don't ask me his position, I'm British – he's the one who throws the ball a lot) called into service when options one and two are both crocked, is ignoring D'Amato's game plays and going his own way with not unimpressive results.
Possibly the most important thing I learned watching this film is that, when his attention is turned from conspiracy theories, director Oliver Stone doesn't really have a lot to say – although Pacino's character in this movie could easily be seen as a surrogate for the director's image of himself: beleaguered and misunderstood, but ultimately victorious.
When the film isn't deliberating over whether Coach D'Amato will buckle under the pressure it's at pains to draw romanticised parallels between the modern American footballer and gladiators/warriors of old. But by trying to idealise the players while simultaneously providing a salacious insight into their hedonistic excesses away from the pitch, the film creates a glaring contradiction that simply serves to distance the audience even further from its deified characters.
Stone's typically breakneck style of storytelling is really the only thing that sets it apart from what is, when stripped of its glossy veneer, an alarmingly stale and clichéd plot. How many times have we seen the ageing warhorse overcoming his self-doubts to win for the coach one last time? The player whose life is football and who is willing to risk paralysis in order to keep on playing? The morally ambiguous doctor willing to overlook the Hippocratic Oath in order to enable these 'warriors' to pursue their dream? The executive losing sight of the meaning of the game while engaged in the irksome politics of big business? Off-duty players snorting cocaine from the breasts of high-class hookers? Well, OK, we might not have witnessed the last one often (enough), but the other plot strands have been done to death a hundred times over.
Pacino wanders through the movie with an expression that swings like a metronome from anger to bewilderment. His choice of roles has become increasingly open to question as he grows older, but this one at least seems to suit his rugged, weary countenance. Jamie Foxx as Willie Breaman, the hotshot newcomer, is convincing enough without ever really stamping his authority on the role, but a miscast Cameron Diaz is sorely out of her depth as the owner of the Miami Sharks and becomes all but invisible in the scenes she shares with Pacino.
Any Given Sunday isn't a bad movie, but neither is it a thing of any worth. Stone refuses to allow the camera to settle for more than a second at a time, and injects random images into intimate conversations that just don't do anything other than make you wonder why he's doing it. And in the end, you get the impression he knew only too well how weak his material was and attempted to distract us all with a display of cinematic pyrotechnics.