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Any Given Sunday by Chris Phillips Oliver Stone finally goes off the deep end with the best Bad Movie in years: the overproduced, overdirected, overacted football saga, Any Given Sunday. Stone exhausts himself trying to turn the silly script into Shakespearean drama, but this fall-down-funny flick has enough pretentious editing and camera work to make John Woo blush, enough foul language to turn Quentin Tarantino's hair white, and enough nudity to keep even football-haters glued to the screen. Forget Al Pacino's relatively subtle work in The Insider. As the movie's head coach, he returns to the scenery-inhaling antics we know and love. The rest of the cast, however, is hardly what you would call restrained. Cameron Diaz lays serious groundwork for a future in Faye Dunaway-esque dragon lady roles as the fire-breathing general manager. Jamie Foxx plays the third-string player prone to vomiting on the field. Dennis Quaid takes up space on the sidelines as the star quarterback. And James Woods struggles with a non-role and lines like, "They are gladiators! They are warriors!" PAGE 1 | 2 |
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Matthew Modine is also on hand to say, "This isn't professional wrestling," but, au contraire! Half the team looks like it was drafted from the WWF. (The other half looks like it wandered in from a West Hollywood circuit party.) When Quaid gets injured, Pacino sends in rookie Foxx. As motivation, Pacino has the team priest give them some inspirational words from his "playbook" (yup, the Bible). Frustrated, Foxx bellows, "The only thing I'm thinking about is the game," and when he wins by defying Pacino, sportscaster John C. McGinley calls him just what you would: "a warrior poet, a new breed of athlete." To celebrate the victory, one of the defensive linemen throws a crocodile into the showers, the team dances to "Dog Catcher" and trouper Diaz beams and shakes hands with buck-naked players. Just for kicks, don't miss the scenes where blowhard Pacino and battle-ax Diaz square off about his coaching style, screaming over each other in vain hopes of landing Oscar nominations. Sure, they win the big game, but to quote Pacino: "Thirty years in football, I've never seen something that stinks like this!" Another thirty years of movies, and you still won't find one that stinks quite as wonderfully as Any Given Sunday. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |