Mythic potboiler

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 1999)

Just as NATURAL BORN KILLERS nailed the pop-culture gestalt of the early nineties--a demon's brew of Springer, tabloids, gothic death cult, grunge aggression and early VH-1--so does ANY GIVEN SUNDAY make an A+ time capsule for late-nineties American pop-cult. The quintessence of Miami South Beach, booty-shakin', synthetic-but-hand-pressed, multiracial-but-still-bland, Mr. Sean Puffy Combs America--in short, late-period VH-1--is clutched in the palm of Oliver Stone's hand as if he were...well, a boomer intellectual Michael Bay, to be frank. You could say--if you were snide--that ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is BAD BOYS with metaphysics. But that would be wrong.
What you hope for going in to ANY GIVEN SUNDAY--entertaining cheese on the level of the dingy but ever watchable WALL STREET--is not what you get. Stone may still be working on a corny level of melodrama, sometimes evocative of seventies disaster movies, but this isn't "Oliver Stone's football movie;" instead, it uses the NFL as a prism to meditate on race, economics and personal ethics in the midst of the fat of a fin-de-siecle boom economy nonpareil. Those who think this is Stone's "apolitical" movie have got 160 minutes of another thing comin'.
It's also a work of studied portraiture on Stone's second favorite subject--his own bad self. Tony (Al Pacino), the beleaguered, alky-looking coach of the Miami Sharks, is a Portrait of the Ollie as a Midcareer Artist. (In a moment of Woody Allenish self-disclosure you wouldn't find in early Stone self-portraits, Pacino falls into the sack with silky-kittenish Elizabeth Berkley...then writes her a check for five thousand dollars.) Age is one of the prime sub-topics, given a rusty grandeur that's part mini-series, part Sophocles. Like the battered quarterback Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid), Tony is out of place in a world of endorsement deals hinged on yards run, and quarterbacks cutting hiphop albums. The negotiation of young brash energy and seasoned wisdom is given a satisfying, motheaten workout. ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is Stone's COLOR OF MONEY--his show that he can still do the old tricks and keep the seats filled. And like COLOR OF MONEY, it ends with an ironic triumph that echoes that movie's resonant last line--"Hey, I'm back!"
For all the attention paid to Pacino's sagging face, Stone directs like a rock-video god given his first hundred million. In a year where some of the world's greatest directors didn't seem to have their head in the game, Stone goes at the material not just hammer and tongs, but with blood, sweat and tears--there's as much of his tissue on the prongs of this movie as in BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. And the style he's minted here--an aggro, stimulant-esque version of a VH-1 marathon--holds for an extraordinary near-three hours. Stone's impressionistic editing remains venturesome, rangy, impressive, and his work with music and sound nearly equals that of NATURAL BORN KILLERS--a career (and perhaps an art-form) high.
Though the leads seem miscast (Cameron Diaz, God love her, may be the most committed major star in Hollywood movies--even to a dreadful part like the Owner's Bitchy Daughter), there are marvellous performances by the truckload here. James Woods doesn't do anything new as a company-man doctor who bends the rules, but he does it with a trim intensity, and some brilliant ad-libbing, that rank among his best work of recent years. (Somehow, only Stone knows how to put a choke collar on this guy.) Jamie Foxx is a revelation as a cocky kid discovering his own superhuman talent, and there are remarkable moments from John C. McGinley, Dick Butkus, Jim Brown, and Matthew Modine in small roles. Even Elizabeth Berkley is damn good. One of the tragedies of the career of Oliver Stone is that while he is known primarily for a) paranoia and b) manic editing, he casts and directs actors better than all but a few living American filmmakers.
ANY GIVEN SUNDAY is a big, heady mixture--part potboiler, part philosophical campfire lecture from Shaman Stone, mixed together in a style that's somewhere between Hype Williams and Cezanne. It's a major Oliver Stone movie--and it's sad that it's being treated fondly and condescendingly, as if Stone directed a campy, gassed-up episode of KNOTS LANDING.