Gets the job done!

Rating: Null/10 (25 January 2000)

Director Oliver Stone finally gives us a break from his habitual "big conspiracy" theme, and delivers this powerfully entertaining movie about an imaginary football team, the Miami Sharks, and the people whose life revolves around it. As it isn't hard to imagine, football is not, after all, just a game.
With Al Pacino in a classic performance as the coach; Cameron Diaz, remarkable as the voracious team owner; and Jamie Foxx as the rebellious hot shot rookie quarterback, this film also stars LL Cool J, Ann Margaret, and Charlton Heston.
This film hits the nail squarely on the head by vividly conveying to us the inside story of the world of professional sports. In that world, almost every decision is conditioned, in one way or another, by money. What makes this flick even more interesting is how, by watching it, the viewer comes to the realization that certain situations that in days gone by would have seemed extracted from the ruminations of a very cynical mind, have already become part of our day-to-day reality, and are accepted as matter-of-factly as we accept the rain and the wind. That is why, when the team owner gets involved with the community and gives to charity, with the ulterior motive of having the city build a stadium for the team at taxpayers' expense, we don't even blink (we've seen it happen many times in our own backyard, haven't we?). Or when, again Cameron Diaz as the team owner, insists that a seriously injured player must make the line up, because if he is benched no team would want to pay $2 million for him, it doesn't quite shock us (doesn't this ring a bell, like when in the 1998 soccer world cup some sponsors were accused of coaxing teams into lining up star players in spite of their injuries?). We would definitely need to be awfully naÃ¯ve to believe that, in this day and age, this kind of stuff only happens in the movies.
On another note, this film succeeds by not falling into the easy trap of presenting the viewer with stereotypical "good vs. bad situations". Instead, it confronts you with many tough calls, where the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable is not clearly marked on the ground: like when the coach must decide if an injured player, who risks being paralyzed if he continues to play, should in fact be allowed to go on playing (the player in question implores the coach to let him play, so he could make a $1 million dollar bonus). Or when, again, the coach must decide if he should allow the veteran quarterback (who has been with the team for 18 years) to return in the playoffs after a long injury recess, or play the cocky rookie that has brought the team back from a seemingly endless loosing streak. Even the outcomes of these two dilemmas have been designed to avoid turning Pacino's coach into a "knight in shining armor" moral hero. Instead, he is portrayed in all his tormented humanity, trying to stand his ground the best he can in a world that he doesn't really understand any more, to which he reluctantly holds on, as there is nowhere else out there that he can go. That is why in the first of these two tough choices, he decides, against his conscience, to let the injured player play, provided that he sign a waiver in favor of the team, just in case something goes wrong (sign of the times, in these fine-printed, legalistic world of ours). In the second choice, however, he stands tall and decides to bet against the table, starting the veteran quarterback.
This is not to say that the film does not have some minor flaws. Like the night football scenes, which are excessively dramatized, filmed under heavy rain and almost total darkness. Or the unlikely scene where the rookie quarterback gets his epiphany before the crucial game, and accepts the coach's decision to bench him, after listening to him speak for just five minutes about the love of the game and the virtues of teamwork. Watching Pacino's coach being so irresistibly persuasive, as to melt down a rap-listening playboy, hot shot quarterback, and turn him into a humble self sacrificing team player with only five minutes of talk, seemed to us a little bit farfetched.
But after all, since the film provides for three solid hours of entertainment, these minor glitches may be easily forgotten.
One word of caution: a good amount of the suspense you will enjoy in this movie is conditioned upon your basic understanding of the rules of football. If you don't know that sometimes you must kick instead of going for the touchdown, or if you have trouble understanding the meaning of a penalty flag, or the value of a time out, I'm not saying that you won't enjoy the movie, but you will definitely miss a beat (just like a bad translation doesn't necessarily ruin the joke, it certainly makes it a little bit less funny).