Rough in spots, but perhaps the best football movie ever made

Rating: Null/10 (19 October 2000)

Stone's overstated style is evident here, although he turned it down a notch compared to "Natural Born Killers" and "Nixon." In places it works, as he's trying to illustrate that there are human realities beneath the carnival of glitz that is professional football. No film has done a better job of portraying on-field action and conveying what a player sees during play. As a player on the college level, these sequences took my breath away. The story, while simply a collage of real-life issues and situations affecting pro sports, is compelling, if somewhat tarnished by a predictable ending. Stone gets great performances out of a strong cast: Pacino shines in one of his best performances of the last 10 years,Jamie Foxx looked and acted like a brash qb, and Dennis Quaid was the perfect battered, John Elway-type hero. Cameron Diaz gave the witch-owner character a level of complexity. She showed glimpses of something more under the corporate shark's skin than a taste for blood. James Woods, Lawrence Taylor (really!), Lauren Holly, LL Cool J, also shine. Although verisimilitude is pushed to it's limits with Willie Beamen's (Foxx) meteoric rise to the "Sports Illustrated" cover and endorsement deals after only one start, no other film has better showed the pains and joys of the game, and the machine of bigtime sports. This is the best football movie ever made.