A good effort, but Any Given Sunday just doesn't work

Rating: 5/10 (2 April 2001)

A good effort, but Any Given Sunday just doesn't work. The film is basically a behind-the-scenes look at professional football. You see the bickering and fighting that goes on among the higher powers up in the box office as well as the conflicts between the players themselves. I think that it was a good portrayal of how instant fame can really go to a person's head and cause them to act in ways that they normally wouldn't, but the football element of the film was awful. It was entirely too polished, football just doesn't look like that. This is what you get when you mix the Hollywood formula with the sport of football.
Much of the film was so blown out of proportion and exaggerated that it made it ridiculous. For example, you have the party at one of the players' ridiculously huge house, particularly the fact that Willie Beamen's (Jamie Foxx) truck was cut in half with a blowtorch by another player who he happened to have offended. This is just crap. And how about the play near the end of the film where one of the players got hit so hard in a play that his eyeball popped out of his head? Yes, POPPED OUT OF HIS HEAD. See how funny that sounds? It's even funnier to see it acted out on screen by a bunch of people who were amazingly able to keep straight faces. Simple logic reveals that a person's head would explode before their eyeball, along with a good length of the optical nerve, would pop out of their head like that.
Thank God for Al Pacino, he saved this movie single-handedly, as the aging coach who began to feel like he was slightly out of his league, coaching a team that would not come together, even for someone who DIDN'T feel too old. Cameron Diaz and especially Dennis Quaid, perfectly cast in the role of the aging quarterback, also added pretty good performances to this otherwise failure of a sports film, but I don't think that Any Given Sunday had much of a chance to begin with. It is clearly a vehicle for nearly everyone involved, a genre film slapped together for the sole purpose of making money, regardless of how much garbage has to be thrown in. >