Typical Stone

Rating: 5/10 (31 October 2000)

A return to the rhetorical, bomabastic, paranoia-driven style of Oliver Stone filmmaking after the brief refreshment that was "U-Turn". Here, Stone turns his attention to professional football as a metaphor for race relations and old American virtues versus new American slash-and-burn viewpoints. Al Pacino is the old-school coach of a struggling team (apparently, Stone couldn't use the NFL, so the league is known as the AFA--with totally unconvincing uniforms to boot) whose aging quarterback (Dennis Quaid) is replaced after an injury by an upstart (Jamie Foxx). The fact that Foxx is black (read: impudent) and popular causes the friction between Pacino and team owner Cameron Diaz and provides most of the drama. Everyone is totally miscast but that doesn't seem to bother the director as he continually searches for each character's vulnerability in order to exploit it. When he does find it, the character is proven to be a sham, most notably Diaz, reduced at the end to be nothing more than a mere woman. It's insulting to say the least. The cast Stone has assembled is huge: in addition to the above-mentioned performers, there's also Ann-Margaret (wasted), James Woods (funny as ever), Matthew Modine, Lawrence Taylor, Charleston Heston, Lauren Holly, Lela Rochon and Elizabeth Berkeley. But it's typical Stone: screeching and hollering with flashy editing to little effect.