Boring, annoying, and pretentious (SPOILERS!)

Rating: 3/10 (16 January 2001)

This is almost like shooting ducks in a barrel. This football movie was made by people who don't know or understand football, and it shows.
The plot -- what there is of it -- is taken from Sports Film 101: struggling team with internal dissension, aging star/hip new rookie, coach past his prime trying to reach back for just one more win, blah blah blah. Guess who wins the big game at the end of the film? And since this is an Oliver Stone film, it tries to be cutting edge and revelatory by showing that athletes (gasp) sometimes abuse chemicals to play! Sometimes they use bad language too, and one or two of them treat women badly. What a shocker. I guess no one involved with AGS ever saw North Dallas Forty, a truly seminal film about professional sports.
Getting past the trite plots and subplots, the direction of this film was bizarre. Stone has made the longest music video in history. Every scene -- and I mean EVERY scene -- is jarringly presenting in quick cuts and odd camera angles. Most of the movie uses overlays of old game films and pictures of old football players. There are frequent times when the pictures go out of focus and the colors mutate -- I can't describe it any better than that. The effect of all this film-school technique is for Stone to shout at you, "LOOK AT ME!! I'M AN IMPORTANT DIRECTOR!!" This film scales the heights of pretentiousness and self-indulgence.
The direction is not the only technical aspect that's botched. At times, the sound editing is so bad that I had to turn on the subtitles in order to understand the dialog. (I was watching the movie on DVD with a brand-new surround-sound system.) At times, the audio sync seemed off. And the uniforms were atrocious, especially those of the Dallas Knights. I've seen better uniforms on high-school teams.
The acting? Well, Pacino was okay, but he was terribly mis-cast in this role. What normal human being looks at Pacino and says, "Football coach"? Lela Rochon (who went to my high school) is the ONLY sympathetic woman in this movie, and I suspect that's because her character held no power. All of the other women in this film come across as castrating bitches, especially an unintentionally hilarious performance by Lauren Holly. Ann-Margret was treated a little more kindly, but she was drunk throughout the entire movie. Cameron Diaz got to play the Delta Burke role from HBO's "First and Ten", which aired about fifteen years ago. Jamie Foxx isn't bad but his character is ridiculous and his character's elevation to star status is completely unbelievable. I will agree with one previous reviewer about Lawrence Taylor -- he's great in this film, as is Jim Brown. James Woods is wasted in a stupid subplot that is so totally undeveloped and yet so trite that you're glad to see him go at about the two-hour mark.
It's become clear that Stone is increasingly incapable of producing a coherent film, and you have to wonder why he keeps getting financing. Probably because the sheep flock to his movies and convince themselves ex post facto of his supposed brilliance. This movie is a waste of time. Even the pedestrian "Replacements" is more entertaining than this.