Any Given Sunday: B

Any Given Sunday starts off very well. In fact, orchaestrated as it is to be an opera of sound and movement by director Oliver Stone, Any Given Sunday starts off with a wallop; a collosal football game photographed with schizophrenic gaudy delirium for nearly thirty minutes. It is a scene-stealer of a set piece, this football game, and it serves its purpose well...to an extent. Though it sets up the characters - Miami Sharks team coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), team owner Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), QB Jack "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid), third-stringer QB Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx) - and atmosphere of the sport with a hypnotic confidence and energy, it is a misleading opener. Because the sad fact is that from the minute that starting game winds down, so too does the movie. Any Given Sunday is a promising production, with a boatload of top-tier names on board, that wallows and ultimately sinks into an ingratiating pool of its own pontificating.

It promises to be a behind-the-scenes look at professional football, fine. And to that end it succeeds. Of course with a movie flavored so overtly cynical as this one, its hard not to suceed at an enterprise such as looking "behind-the-scenes", by which of course I mean skewering a national export with something wavering between sincerity and sarcasm.

There is an unintentional side-effect to being so self-righteously pompous though. The negatives, you see, of decrying every character on screen with a toxic cynicism are that in doing so, you deprive yourself - and the audience - of a forceful center of gravity on which to anchor the movie. Even more, there is left a gaping hole of emotion right next to that oh-so-recently vacated "Star of the Show" that should have been filled from the get-go with say...I don't know...Al Pacino? Dennis Quaid? Jim Brown?

The irony of Any Given Sunday is that, in the end, it is just as much of an "inspirational sport's film" as it desparately wants to be a stringent docu-drama of locker room cat fights. What someone failed to tell Stone and his co-writer John Logan, is that you really should pick: vanilla or chocolate, boxers or briefs, docu-drama or dramatic inspiration. So either someone failed to communicate this sacred advice to the director, or (the more likely and distressing scenario) he got so tied up in his moralist speechifying that he forgot it completely. The result? Not only then is that left out in the cold, but so too is the audience.

Sure there are some nice performances - no one will ever say that Pacino can't deliver a rousing monologue - and Stone's patented split-second splice-crazy media-distillation that he calls directing is a visually, and occasionally emotionally, resonant head-trip. But the fact remains that at the end of the day, or as the movie puts it "on any given Sunday", this movie will go down as Oliver Stone's gloss on the Great Big Sports Film; a movie that looked tantilizingly supreme but ultimately failed at its most fundamental level: its heart. Given the various last-second moral awakenings and inspiring victories that propel the climactic, and extremely well-executed, final game it makes me almost long for a more clear cut, clear eyed film; something that reaches for the stars and achieves them, for no matter how short a time, instead of Any Given Sunday, a Good Film that should have been a Great Film but faltered, fell, and landed squarely into a dissapointing shade of gray.