Any Given Sunday

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

Rating: C
If you've ever lugged a video camera to a sporting event such as football or horseracing, you've come to realize the dilemma you're in. These sports receive so much film and television coverage that elements like camera placement and focal lengths have been nailed down to a science. It's almost impossible to come up with interesting shots which still convey what's happening in the action. At worst you fail miserably; at best you produce shots which inspire yawns rather than thrills because everyone's seen the same shots on TV ad nauseam.

In Any Given Sunday director Oliver Stone wrestles with this problem throughout the entire movie. The opening twenty minutes or so are a frantic montage of shots of the fictional Miami Sharks taking on a rival pro football team. Something Stone doesn't seem to realize is that the offbeat montage techniques which worked so well in JFK don't necessarily translate well to less sinister narratives. Occasionally, the rapid barrage of shots falls into a groove with the background music, and you find yourself enjoying the experience, but it never lasts very long. Extreme closeups of the on-field action are liberally interspersed with shots of buxom fans in the stands, overhead blimp angles, the coaches reacting on the sidelines, and lots and lots of footage of the skimpily attired cheerleading squad. The overall effect is to portray the game as some kind of bizarre ritualistic ceremony, complete with Native American chanting in the background.

When the camera finally settles down to tell a story (at which point you feel like vigorously shaking the cinematographer's hand and exclaiming, "Oh thank you, thank you, thank you"), we find Shark coach Al Pacino in a four-game losing streak and facing the dilemma of whether to stick with aging quarterback Dennis Quaid or to phase him out in favor of young upstart Jamie Foxx. The team owner the year Pacino and Quaid won the championship has since died, leaving the team to daughter Cameron Diaz. Since the Sharks have lately been struggling, Pacino and Diaz spend a lot of time debating who's to blame for the team's decline, and the place of loyalty in a profession where winning is the only thing. Pacino, for his part, sees coaching as a means of bringing order into the uncertainties of life. Where else can you receive such an unambiguous assessment of whether you're a winner or a loser? Where else can you have so much hands-on control over the factors which make you a winner or a loser?

It's somewhat sad that so much effort was devoted to avoiding clichés in the camera work when the script of Any Given Sunday is riddled with them. Once-great athletes being coldly pushed aside when they can no longer produce has been explored before, in North Dallas Forty among others. That film, too, showed players being manipulated through mind games and painkillers all in the interest of the team's win/loss percentage. Foxx's sudden success going to his head is a story as old as the medium of film itself. And what sports film would be complete without the obligatory scene of an attractive woman entering a locker room filled with naked men? When the Sharks are parked on the opponent's goal line late in the big game, desperately needing to score, memories of The Longest Yard are invoked. But unlike that film, the audience realizes here that they really don't care whether the team scores or not. That, unfortunately, says a lot about this film.