uneven

Rating: 6/10 (25 February 2003)

when i heard that oliver stone and al pacino were doing a football movie i was excited as hell...i'm a huge football fan and never miss a movie about the sport (except those were dogs play football)...i was hoping that stone's signature visual style would open up a new dimension in how football scenes are usually portrayed...-
what we ended up with is a movie that can't decide what it wants to be...is it a movie about the game?...is it about the business?...is it about handling success and the pressures that come along with it?...it mixes all those elements into a muddled something without ever conveying what it wants to say...-
now, the football scenes are very detailed but are not the stuff that i hoped for from stone...they convey the speed of the game but are not as exciting as they were in "the program" or even "the waterboy" (a movie in which the football scenes were awesome)...so that was a dissapointment...also, i didn't like the over-the-top-humour used during game time (like the puking or fans beating each other up) which contributed to the overall unevenness of the film-
the up-side about the movie was the performances given by the actors...al pacino, cameron diaz and foxx do their best to keep the tension alive and even some of the non-actors (LL Cool J and Lawrence Taylor) give good performances...-
all in all i still think it's a movie worth watching if you are a fan of football or of al pacino...it's just not what i had hoped for from such an all-star team-