Any Given Sunday

Oliver Stone’s (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) tale of hard knocks football is something I want to love very badly.  It’s a great story about how fucked up the game is for so many people, there are great characters like the cocky yet loveable “Steamin’” Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx (Law Abiding Citizen)), there’s great attitude with an unflattering take on the sport while simultaneously glorifying it, but all of this is unfortunately destroyed by extraordinarily shitty editing.

There’s also some miscasting that’s distracting.  Al Pacino (The Panic in Needle Park) comes off more like a cranky dad armchair quarterbacking than an actual head coach for a major football team.  With his tiny size you know he never played the game when he was younger and because he delivers his lines in kind of a theatrical showy way you don’t believe for a second that he’s really knowledgeable about the topic.

The other miscast actor is Denis Quaid (The Big Easy) as the Miami Sharks’ star quarterback.  He was 45 in real life at the time which is a little too old for the role.  Most quarterbacks are retired by the time they’re 40.  And I know that Quaid’s character is supposed to be at the end of his career but he just physically looks too old.

Now I could overlook a couple of questionable casting decisions but what I can’t get past is how Oliver Stone and four fucking editors (Stuart Levy (Foxcatcher), Thomas J. Nordberg (U Turn), Keith Salmon (Lightning in a Bottle), Stuart Waks (Days of Thunder)) chopped this sonuvabitch up.  There are so many cuts that it’s hard to focus on what’s happening.  But then there’s really on the nose shit too like when Pacino and Foxx are arguing with each other about Foxx’s career there are shots intercut of the sky clouding up quickly building towards a storm.  Get it?  Their relationship is hitting a rough patch you dolts.  Or when Foxx gets put in as quarterback for the first time he gets so nervous that he throws up on the field and the film cuts to a sped-up aerial shot of the stadium with the camera shaking all over the place, plus fifteen other various things.  Whoa this is some crazy shiiiiit!  You think the picture can’t possibly keep up this frantic pace for two and a half hours but fuck me, it somehow does.  I mean each individual shot is good and actually nicely setup and everything but when they’re strung together like someone dumped all the footage into a meat grinder it becomes a chaotic viewing experience (in a bad way).

Add in the fact that the NFL didn’t want to have anything to do with this movie so the filmmakers had to use fake team names and that makes the whole piece feel illegitimate and grimier.  Plus several characters get shortchanged and could’ve even had their own film like linebacker Luther Lavay (Lawrence Taylor (Shaft (2000))) who’s one injury away from paralysis but keeps on playing because how the hell else is he gonna support his family?  This isn’t LL Cool J’s best work either (he did the more fun, although equally outrageous, giant killer shark movie Deep Blue Sea the same year).  You put all this together and you definitely start to have more problems than you want.

But the weird thing is this could be the most realistic football film ever made.  All the shit about the doctors not being forthcoming with medical results because of pressure from the team owner, players putting their lives on the line because they desperately want to reach a quota so they can earn their bonus, coaches dealing with cocky albeit talented players, drug and alcohol abuse, painkiller dependence, immense stress to perform and win, objections over the future direction of the team and etc.  The picture covers a lot of ground which is impressive.  It just does it in the messiest way possible.

I dunno guys.  Any Given Sunday is flashy and certainly entertaining all the way through.  There aren’t lulls that the picture gets caught in, it simply doesn’t have time with so many storylines.  All the shit off the field is definitely better than any of the real football playing, but all the best composed and prettiest shots are of the dudes out on the gridiron doin’ their thang.

This is a tough one.  I do love it but it’s kinda fuckin’ annoying too.