brutal

Rating: 2/10 (1 January 2001)

There are some comments in this review that talk about specific scenes, including one of the scenes near the end of the movie, but since I couldn't really discern any real plot, I don't think that I'm spoiling anything.
I'm not a big Oliver Stone fan, so this movie had a strike against it from the first. But once I watched it, I realized it wasn't any different from any of his other movies that I've seen. Oliver Stone is the guy that lives on your street that is the neighbourhood crank, always convinced that somebody is up to something to hurt him or to cover something up. The underlying premise in the movie is that every player is trying to maim every other player, when we all know this isn't true. And the part where the guy's eyeball falls out onto the field? Oh, sure, we've all seen that happen before! Those guys don't want to end each other's careers (Bryan Cox excluded, of course) because they know it could happen to them just as easily. And James Woods, who looks in the movie like he's 75, could never have practiced that long by constantly putting players' lives in jeopardy! Don't you think that maybe just one of his former players would have said something by now? Also, you don't see many team doctors making out with cheerleaders on the sidelines.
This is just a cartoonish look at pro football and is almost too ridiculous for words. How many NFL coaches, with their high profile, do you think could get away with drinking themselves into a stupor every night in public and paying for prostitutes? Very few, I would guess. What coach would announce at his retirement that he's taking a job to coach an expansion team and basically dump on the people that have set up such an extravagant and emotional send-off for him?
The reason that so many high-profile actors worked on this turkey is amazing to me. Surely some of them must have read the script before they agreed to be in it. Al Pacino, while a great actor, was mostly lame in his part, but lame doesn't even begin to describe Dennis Quaid's performance. Dan Marino Jr., as one of Quaid's character's sons, does a better job, and he doesn't even have any speaking lines!
While I'm at it, what was that gladiator scene all about? The only thing I can figure is that someone on the direction/production team has a thing for men in armorplate and underwear.
Really, does anyone honestly think that an entire team, with all the assorted groupies and hangers-on around, would have a party like the one shown at LT's house with hookers and rampant drug use in full view of everyone? That would be in the newspaper before they could crawl out from under the bed in the morning! Ask Michael Irvin, he could tell you.
Overall, it's little wonder that the NFL wouldn't let Stone use real teams in his movie. The plot is so outlandish that it could only be dreamed up by someone like Oliver Stone, who apparently did his NFL research by watching the WWF for hours on end. Watching the movie made me wonder whether or not Mr. Stone has ever even watched a game on TV, much less seen one in person. I'm sorry that I lost more than two hours of my life watching it.