While Tony and Art had a gentlemen's agreement type of relationship, Christina, who grew up calling Tony "Uncle Tony", isn't afraid to flex her muscles to make the team a success, she seeing the team's coaching future in the younger offensive coordinator, Nick Crozier.
Her ultimate goal is to move the team to the larger market of Los Angeles, timely in her issues with how little she has seen Miami Mayor Tyrone Smalls put into maintaining the aging stadium or that there has been no talk about replacing it. The team, however, has to be a success for her to have the money to do so.
Back on the field, Cap, who believes he will be healthy enough to play in the playoffs, comes to the realization that if Willie got them to the playoffs, he may be the favored starter in the playoffs, especially seeing to Cap's time off and age.
Cap's health issue is minor compared to that of linebacker Luther Lavay, which highlights the differences between the team's doctors, Harvey Mandrake and Ollie Powers who sit on opposite sides of the player welfare versus overall team success at all cost debate.
A star quarterback gets knocked out of the game and an unknown third stringer is called in to replace him. The unknown gives a stunning performance and forces the aging coach to reevaluate his game plans and life.
The new owner must prove her self in a male dominated world. An aging football coach finds himself struggling with his personal and professional life while trying to hold his team together. This is not a good thing, since it inevitably takes the viewer out of the reverie needed to enjoy a film and sets him or her up as an arbiter of Stone's technique.
The filmmaker has engaged in this sort of cinematic masturbation before most notably in Natural Born Killers , but never to this extent. Used sparingly, aspects of this approach can be effective, but Stone gorges himself on bizarre shots and visual weirdness. Complete with a relentless, driving score that is half heavy metal and half hip-hop, the film almost functions as the longest music video ever assembled.
It is the embodiment of the MTV style, never dwelling on anything for more than a second or two. It jumps around like a marionette on speed. During Any Given Sunday 's first half, a story struggles to emerge from the assualt on our senses. Thankfully, by the time the movie approaches the two hour mark it's yet another entry into the Christmas three-hour club - the official running length is , Stone has lightened up and we are allowed to relax and concentrate on the plot.
In fact, despite the cynical, world-weary tone that pervades Any Given Sunday 's first two-thirds, the final 60 minutes plays like a fairly traditional football movie.
There's even an old-fashioned moral: winning may be important, but it's not as important as how you play the game. The only thing missing at the end is a group hug. The anti- Knute Rockne sentiment which pervades much of the film is wiped away by the time the end credits roll. The story is relatively straightforward, which makes it unfathomable why Stone felt he needed three hours to tell it. Nearly every long movie released during the final two months of has suffered from director overindulgence.
Hollywood argues that we're getting more for our money, but there are times when less is better. Not that Any Given Sunday is a great film, by any means. It starred Al Pacino, right around the period when he became a self-parody, the period that the SNL imitators reach for when they're doing Al Pacino. The shouty period. And under Stone's direction, every ounce of that shoutiness is parlayed into one cliched speech right after another: the halftime speech during the regular season, the halftime speech during the playoffs, the I-gave-my-life-to-this-game speech, the this-is-the-wisest-speech-you'll-ever-hear-kid speech.
Any Given Sunday is a football movie that Ronald Reagan would have recognized: the old classic quarterback who's a team player played by Dennis Quaid against the new hotheaded selfish quarterback Jamie Foxx. A team falling apart as it heads into the playoffs, then redeemed at the last minute. The veteran coach looking for one last big victory, worried that he's a has-been.
The owner who has inherited the franchise looking to prove herself. After you've seen the first ten minutes, you could probably write out the plot yourself, beat by beat. But inside all that cliche is actually a very interesting, and very pertinent, vision of football.
The term "gladiator" is often used as a compliment when discussing football players. Stone takes the comparison literally. He intercuts scenes from Ben-Hur with his own drama. And he is clear that these men have sold their bodies and their health in the pursuit of an entirely gratuitous and temporary glory, and money that pours away nearly as quickly as it pours in.
The movie's best scene — and it is one of the great scenes in all of Oliver Stone's movies — involves Cameron Diaz, as the owner, walking into the locker room after a big win.
Stone somehow got full-frontal male nudity past the MPAA. The winces of pain from onlookers in the crowd and on the sidelines. The screams. In some ways, Any Given Sunday is an even more interesting war movie, despite being a much lesser film overall. Platoon is forthright in its sympathy for the soldiers, in its belief in those men even as it has no sympathy for the war itself.
Maybe because of its broader view of the corrosive nature of football as an institution, Any Given Sunday makes the line between good and bad all the more blurry. For glory? But just as much because he wants these men to feel like men. This movie is what comes to mind for me every time a real-life football player takes a bad hit and lingers, just a little longer than normal, on the ground.
I immediately think back to the moments of Cap Rooney looking out at the world through the fog of his injuries. Is that the life you want for yourself? Is this the life you want for yourself? Every major character in the film confronts that question by the end. And because football is an institution, and not merely a game, the consequences of these choices are unilaterally bigger than the people making them.
On the 15th anniversary of its release a few years ago, writers were quick to note that the repeated concussions and other dire injuries made for an eerie rewatch amid so many public-health debates on that subject raging online, on sports networks, and in living rooms across the country.
Stone has never shied away from stuffing mangled fistfuls of bullish political provocation into his movies, but Jesus.
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