This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #20: Any Given Sunday
There’s a crass joke that hangs out in bawdier environments, that if a man could suck his own dick, he’d never leave the house. This movie is two and a half hours of director Oliver Stone sucking his own dick, over and over and over and over.
Because I hardly even know where to start with this one, I will start with the description on IMDb: “A behind-the-scenes look at the life-and-death struggles of modern-day gladiators and those who lead them.” Jiminy Christmas.
This is a movie that takes itself way too seriously, that sees itself as a gritty actualization of a greedy, corrupt, morally bankrupt society, that purports to be an indictment of the world of professional football and all involved. What it actually is, however, is an overwrought, self-involved, overwhelmingly cynical yet hilariously clichéd, run-of-the-mill sports film. Not even a good sports film, or an emotionally satisfying sports film, just a boring, painfully average, unoriginal sports film.
The opening scene sets the tone immediately. We’re near the end of the first half of a game between the Miami Sharks and the Minnesota Americans (my hand to God, those are the team names — either the NFL wanted nothing to do with this movie or Oliver Stone didn’t want to compromise his “artistic integrity” by kowtowing to the corporate machine). Seasoned (read: old) quarterback Jack “Cap” Rooney (Dennis Quaid) takes the snap, can’t find an open receiver, and gets sandwiched between two defenders before falling hard to the ground. He fumbles the ball, and the Americans (seriously, the dumbest name) scoop and score. To make matters worse, Rooney is on the ground, writhing in pain. Team doctor James Woods (as Dr. Harvey Mandrake — who thought these up??) comes out onto the field and berates Rooney for not getting up, for being a pussy, for playing to the cameras, and for being a pussy some more. He pretty much does everything but kick the poor guy in the balls, never once even remotely acting like a doctor — not even for the cameras, as he so cynically assumed his player would be. So five minutes in, not only is it perfectly clear this movie is only going through the motions of actual athletic competition drama, simply rehashing by rote every scene from every football movie ever made, it also hates football and has nothing but disdain for everyone and everything associated with football, up to and including its fans.
The entire film is like this — every negative stereotype you could ever come up with about football players, coaches, owners, fans, or families, is put into play. Somehow, every character is both inept and cocky.
The coach (Al Pacino) is old and out of his league, making bad calls and getting out-coached at every turn, but he’s also an arrogant blowhard who’s disrespectful and misogynistic towards the team’s owner (Cameron Diaz, playing the daughter who inherited her father’s team upon his death), petty and vindictive with both his players and his staff, not to mention sad and pathetic because he pays $5000 a night for a hooker (Elizabeth Berkley, of course) and then wants her to be his girlfriend for real because he’s so lonely and washed up. Honestly, I don’t think it would be possible to throw more distasteful characteristics his way, but just for good measure he also shouts everything in that grating Al Pacino manner until your ears bleed.
In the exact same vein, Diaz’s character is a greedy ballbuster — like Rachel Phelps in Major League, except not funny or cartoonishly villainous or anything remotely interesting. She’s the clichéd daughter of a man who wanted a son, always trying to run with the big boys and prove her worth, but she’s also conducting some nefarious machinations behind the scenes to move the team (literally, she’s the boring and even more awful Rachel Phelps), so she’s mean and unlikable, while also being the target of every piece of sexist condescension they could think of, coming from every man she interacts with. The coach hates her, the players undermine her, the mayor talks down to her, her father’s associates patronize her, and somehow she has to wind up apologizing to her drunk fool mother (Ann-Margret) for … something, I don’t know. Being a hard-nosed bitch, I think. It’s insulting.
The players, too, are caricatures of actual football players. They have a drunken cocaine hooker party at a D.A.R.E charity event, for crying out loud. They have no team unity, and only look out for themselves — a trait that surely exists with some players, but not all the players on a single team. L.L. Cool J plays a running back all about endorsement deals. Bill Bellamy is a coked out wide receiver. Lawrence Taylor is the “heart” of the defense whose health is in serious danger but who keeps playing despite the risks so he gets his million dollar bonus (on the same play that he likely paralyzes himself, but hey — a million dollars!). And Jamie Foxx is third string quarterback Willie Beaman, thrust into that first game against the Americans (ugh) when Rooney and then Rooney’s backup are injured in back-to-back plays. Despite being a vomiting mess who doesn’t know half the plays in the playbook, he does a few athletic things, wins a game (not that first one, but one, eventually, and then some more) and suddenly is an arrogant jerk talking about how great he is, how he has “invisible juice” so defenses can’t get him (before he’s predictably destroyed by a defense — like I said, somehow both inept and cocky), how he doesn’t need his linemen or his offensive teammates or his defensive teammates, how something something racial is going on, and recording his own music video in which he states his name is Willie Beaman and he “leaves the girls creamin’.” Gross.
The assistant coaches are all raging madmen or scowling their disapproval of how the team’s being managed. The fans are prototypical fat assholes, fighting in the stands. The players’ wives are all either snotty, greedy mean girls or beaten down doormats, and Beaman’s long-standing girlfriend (Lela Rochon) flies off the handle at Beaman when the Mean Girl wives are bitchy to her, at which point he calls her a dyke and screams at her to leave. (All the players scream at all the women, at all times. You know, because women are greedy bitches or whores or bitches and whores and all men treat them as such.) The opposing players (on teams just as ludicrously named as the Americans — the Chicago Rhinos, anyone? And don’t even get me started on the freaking Pantheon Cup nonsense) are all hostile and violent — motherfucker this and that is pretty bland, but early on one of them yells that one of the Sharks is going to be “pulling pieces of dick out of his ass” and at another point near the end of the film a man’s eyeball gets ripped out on the field. I hate it when that happens. There’s even an extended game-time montage set to a song, the primary lyrics of which are “my niggers,” on repeat, ad infinitum.
As for the game itself, it’s so far outside how basic football works I can’t decide if the filmmakers don’t watch and/or understand football at all, or if the NFL was so opposed to this movie they made them change weirdly inconsequential things like uniforms and TV graphics and whatnot. The Sharks have the most basic uniform of all, all black with white lettering and numbers, but all the other teams are in these garish colors with massive designs on them. (The Dallas Knights, for example, are in gold with giant red crosses on their chests.) And no team has a different uniform for away games at all. Home or away, it’s the same every time. I never did catch the initialism for the league that these teams are in, but on the TV broadcasts, the team with the higher score gets listed on top, rather than listing the visiting team on top, so there are times when it switches which team is listed first. The commentators and sports writers are also incredibly trite — even worse than the real life ones. At one point Oliver Stone, making a cameo as one of the TV announcers, says of Jamie Foxx, “He’s got genius ankles.” I swear, I could not make that up. The sports writer, played by John C. McGinley in an awful haircut, refers to Beaman as a “warrior poet,” of all things. And it’s a nitpicky football complaint, but there’s a point at which the Knights have the ball and the Sharks need a stop. The Knights are up 35-31 on fourth down, and instead of kicking a field goal, they decide to go for a touchdown, at which point the announcers say they’re “going for the win instead of the tie.” This is not what’s happening. They are already winning. Even if they do nothing, the Sharks will need a touchdown, because a field goal will still leave them a point shy. All the Knights are doing at this point is trying to keep the ball and run out the clock. That’s it. If it weren’t such a clichéd trope, it would be an emotionally significant stop either way.
Hilariously, though, at some point someone must’ve told Stone that sports movies have to have uplifting and celebratory endings, because literally out of nowhere, during the final game sequence, there is suddenly soaring music and slo-motion action. Foxx and Pacino share a hackneyed joke on the sidelines, Diaz chooses this time to apologize to her mother for … something, and everyone has learned a very valuable lesson probably, or at the very least their hearts grew three sizes that day.
Of course, the forced agenda of the film isn’t the only thing that makes it self-indulgent. The camera work and editing actually accomplishes that all on its own. Repeatedly, throughout the film, as a scene of game footage plays out, it is intercut with conversations of various other characters — Diaz in the owner’s booth, the coaches on the sidelines, whatever. When two characters are in the middle of a conversation, the camera jumps from them to close-ups of various knickknacks and photos and game paraphernalia, while they’re still talking. When the team loses, and Pacino’s character is feeling downtrodden, there are quick fades to other random people in the bar, players around town, and whoever else, just to show how sad everyone is. And every single scene is shot with at least half a dozen cameras, so one second you’re in tight close-up, the next you’re looking down from an awkward angle filmed by a camera in the ceiling, the next moment everything is off-tilt in a different direction coming from a two-shot. If it’s not the schizophrenic editing, it’s blurred pans to convey a dizzy or concussed player or perhaps the coach having a sepia-toned vision of football games gone by (not sure at all what’s going on there, but the players have leather helmets?). My favorite parts, though, are the random hard cuts to rapid lightning flashes in a cloudy night sky. No rhyme or reason for them to be there, but maybe Stone wants to let his audience know how emotionally stormy everything is. And if you can’t see me rolling my eyes from here, then you’re not paying attention.
The fact of the matter is, I really like sports movies. I own quite a few, and I probably own more football movies than any other sport-related film because I’m such a huge fan of the game. I think that might be what disappoints me most about this one. I remember going to see it in the theater and just instantly, vociferously hating it (this is one of the ones my husband owned when we met) — not because it’s exposing a side of football people are uncomfortable with, but because it’s so wrapped up in its predetermined mission statement and utterly negatively stereotyped substance that it loses all credibility and feeling of authenticity. It wants so badly to be taken seriously that I can’t possibly take it seriously.
Also, it’s just a really terrible film.
Viable Option 