Too Long Before The Touchdown

Rating: 5/10 (29 April 2007)

Somebody hire Oliver Stone an editor! At more than two-and-a-half hours long, our interest in this football soap opera runs out long before the final touchdown.
But there's more wrong here than a gaping story/running time gap. "Any Given Sunday" tries to say too many things at once. Stone examines a plethora of angles: questionable medical ethics, the familial cost of being a workaholic, the media's short attention span, drug abuse and promiscuity, etc., etc. The end result appears undisciplined. Worse yet, the most interesting of the angles - coach Al Pacino's need to overcome sentimentality in a dog-eat-dog sport - is woefully underexplored.
Yet like the game it depicts, "Any Given Sunday" has its share of ups and downs. The film's flashiness spurs a degree of excitement, but eventually becomes overwhelming. The vulgarity brings an element of realism, but this too just becomes too much after the first hour. The brightest spot is the cast, arguably one of the most talented and diverse ever to grace a sports film. Pacino is at his usual high level, while the likes of Jamie Foxx, James Woods and Aaron Eckhart aren't far behind - all the more reason for disappointment at the final result.