I had some very high expectations, but didn't see them fulfilled

Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2005)

American football is probably a very popular sport on the other side of the ocean, but over here we don't really know or see anything about it (only with the Superbowl). That's of course a big handicap when you want to sell a movie to a large audience. Will they be interested in a subject that they don't know anything about? Well perhaps not, but when you let Oliver Stone direct the movie and put some great actors in the cast, you can be sure that there will be people who will watch it anyway. One of those people was me, being a great fan of Al Pacino and Oliver Stone, I hoped for the best.
"Any Given Sunday" tells the story of an aging coach, called Tony D'Amato, who finds himself struggling with his players, his personal life, the staff and the management of the team. He has to keep his team together, but then bad fortune kicks in. A devastating hit knocks his biggest star player, a professional football legend, out of the game. He's replaced by a young and unknown player who has spend all his time on the bench instead of on the field. Beaman as he is called, seizes this once in a lifetime opportunity and shows what a great athlete he actually is. He is so good at what he does that it seems the beginning of a new era in football, making many people believe that all of D'Amato's values and strategies are old-fashioned and not adapted to the new times. In the meantime D'Amato also has to cope with Christina Pagniacci, the new aggressive and young president / co-owner of the team. She doesn't know much about the game, but her desire to prove herself in this male dominated world is enormous. She mainly focuses on the marketing and business of football, in which all coaches and players are merely properties.
Now I know for sure: There just are no more certainties in life. Knowing that this movie was directed by Oliver Stone and that people like Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx, James Woods,... were in the cast, made me believe that this would be a terrific movie. But I'm afraid I was wrong. It's probably true that every director has made great and bad movies, but this one I really didn't see coming. I like the fact that they try to give a very broad view on the world of professional American football. They show us how a match is played and how the management behind it all works, but they don't shy away from showing drug abuse, the parties with expensive hookers, the awful medical practices,... either. But the entire story drowns in the many clichés. An older coach who starts having doubts and who likes to drink, a former star player who can't live with the fact that a new generation is taking over, the new generation who can't cope with the success very well,... You can find it all in this movie. It really offers nothing that you haven't seen before.
But the story wasn't even my biggest problem. What I hated a lot more was the camera work. The 'MTV video clip' style of filming, with some loud techno / rock / rap music in the background is probably very fashionable, but it doesn't work and can't conceal the lack of a good story. It only made everything look very jumpy and nervous and more than once I had the feeling that they were a moment too late to capture an important part of action in the middle of the screen. Also the fact that Oliver Stone sometimes cuts completely irrelevant scenes in the middle of dramatic scenes is unbelievably annoying. For some reason or another he has used shots of a lightning storm, clouds rolling by and even a part from the classic movie "Ben Hur" to 'enhance' certain moments.
As a conclusion I would like to say that you better try another movie when you are interested in the small world that American Football is. Only when you are an absolute fan I think you can fully enjoy this overlong movie. It has some good dramatic moments, but overall it just doesn't offer what you can expect from a Stone movie with such famous actors in it. The actors did their best, but they were never able to make you forget about the bad camera work and the weak story. I give it a 6/10.