Grinding and powerful - why doesn't it quite work?

Rating: 5/10 (13 May 2001)

"Any Given Sunday" is worthless to watch outside a movie theater. Don't rent it. The loud, continuous brawl of the movie is essential to the experience. The movie is great to watch because it is very powerful thanks to the clever, never-ending motion of the story, the characters and the very blended pictures, sounds and music. But the story isn't catching enough and the film is terribly overlong and over ambitious. A film of epic proportions like this one should have something more important to say. As an insight into the world of elite sports it's pretty interesting. But it just feels a bit unnecessarily over-wrought.