Like two separate movies-the first one being quite mediocre.

Rating: Null/10 (6 January 2001)

Overall, Any Given Sunday is a good watch. It has a great deal of action, and some of the game scenes are actually very well done, minus a lot of jerky camera moves that do nothing to help the story or action.
This movie is like two movies in one. The majority of the movie was like a bad music video, with nonstop weirdness when it came to camera shots/angles, weird fade outs, blurry and out of focus shots, etc. The game scenes in the first half of the film are just horrible. Sometimes there's game action sound, then sometimes everything is drowned up by rap music that is WAY too loud. Then...you have the fact that one second, everything is slow and methodical, then BAM, fast and crazy again. It works every now and then, but every single time...no way. It becomes way too annoying. I have never really liked Stone, besides his work on JFK (even tho half of the movie is factually wrong.) His direction takes away from the story itself, and the characters and plot are just secondary items that hold the music video- like segments together. That's not how a movie is supposed to work. A good movie uses the cast and story as a basis, and works off of that. A lot of the time, I couldn't tell if this was a straight up movie or a documentary...the first half being much more a documentary, the second being a movie. In the first half you'll have a shot of a player, then the screen will divide in half, the right side being full-frame, the left dividing into 3 or 4 other smaller shots of the exact same shot as the right side. Too much of that is annoying, and it makes Stone look like a recent film school grad who can't wait to try out some new tricks. He overuses them all. If he would have just toned down the first half--cut out the jerky, dizzying shots every two seconds, this would have been a great film. Then again, maybe not, because the middle of the film drags on forever. The beginning is full of football scenes, as is this end, but the middle is a nonstop mix of overacted dullness. Another thing that might annoy is the fact that all the characters seem to suddenly become new people overnight in the middle of the film. Jamie Foxx's character is a complete A-hole who always has the look of death on his face, then suddenly he changes into this nice, funny, charming guy, who is so nice he tries to get his girlfriend back, and is all joking with her. I find that hard to grasp. People don't usually change overnight, and if, by some miracle, they do, it's not like that! Anyhow...it's a good watch, especially if you love football, but a lot of people will find the direction completely missing the mark. The second half of the movie is very well done and very tense...you know how it's going to turn out, but you can't help but be caught up in the action biting your nails down to nothing...if only Stone had done the first half as well as the second, and took out the artsy crap, it would have been so much better.