Pacino as Coach Tony D’Amato has the wise grizzled look, quiet ferocity, and gut wrenched longing of the general who has led his men to the ultimate triumph but whose team and personal life slide off as a season crunches to a disastrous end. The mythical Miami Sharks have lost four games in a row. Cap (Dennis Quaid), D’Amato’s aging superstar quarterback, wrenches a spinal disk and writhes in a hospital. He is replaced by third round draft pick Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx) who pukes when he enters the huddle, but proves to be a superb play maker. LL Cool J convincingly plays a star running back about to enter the record books when Beaman steals his thunder and refuses to give him the ball. In this pattern, each major player must deal with himself and with others as the game grinds on.

Glowering in the owners box and posh Miami office, strutting into the locker room, and weeping over the ghost and memory of her dead father from whom she inherited the Sharks, Cameron Diaz takes on the role of team co-owner, Christina Pagniacci. She loves the sport but revels in the larger game of big bucks ownership. Winning with a razzle-dazzle passing game and possibly even moving to Los Angeles for huge money motivates her to pressure the old Coach to change his loyalties and style to support Beaman rather than Cap. Her conflict with the Coach who made the team great with her father ramps up in sequence after sequence.

Even Anna-Maria, who is not a great lover of American football, loved the movie. The game footage shows the amazing extent of the sheer brute force in the sport. We have watched a few of the late season games, and Anna-Maria appreciates them more because Any Given Sunday has given her an intimate feel for what is going on. She particularly appreciated seeing a woman (and Cameron Diaz at that) as an owner who busts balls and schemes cleverly, and yet weeps, with her boys or alone, as she pays the price for clawing to stay on top and to wield her power. She balances financial realities, the love of the game, and her own ambitions. She makes mistakes and tries to correct them by changing strategy or through soul-searching.

As with any Oliver Stone movie, the themes are complex, but they are pulled together in a focused and dramatic way. The clashing of honor, integrity, and leadership with vanity, blood lust, and power play is as tangible as the crashing of bodies on the scrimmage line. We both left the film wondering at how our human nature, both individual and tribal, is full of blood lust and power play, and yet we have come to a point of civilization where we can experience our primal urges on a controlled, non-lethal battlefield of a football game.

Some have compared the game and this movie to the Roman gladiators. The analogy has some parallels. The players sacrifice their bodies as they pump themselves and shoot painkillers to make it onto the field to win. They are in reality a bunch of heavily muscled prima donnas, especially when the financial rewards become huge. The coaches must juggle the pressures from the owners, the fans, the media, and their personal demons in order to trick out the best players for each game. In a way, they have all become slaves to the game; only in this game, victory and loss offer the opportunity for a prize far greater than life or death.

The effect of media money and stupid reporters is well illustrated in bits that in many aspects amount to comic relief. It seems that news people have become the favorite fool in modern cinema, especially since we no longer favor people of color or women in these roles, and lawyers are becoming an old target for stereotyped abuse.

The field play was pumped up with a heavy rap sound track that drove home the themes and the action. The players smash, leap, and grunt in great cinematography and choreography. The off-field play developed with consistently powerful performances.

An almost sweet aspects of Any Given Sunday are major acting roles taken on by some of the greats of the game. Jim Brown shines as a wise, intense, and honorable defensive coordinator who has earned the right to exact excellence as he shapes up his men on and, sometimes, off the field. Lawrence Taylor provides playing intensity, comic relief, and avuncular perspective to the younger players in his role as Shark, the defensive captain and pounding middle linebacker. As a part of a subplot involving James Woods as the team physician, Shark has an old neck fracture that may kill him if he gets hit wrong. The process of making a decision to play illustrates just how much pain and risk a player takes to stay in the game.

Other former luminaries appear in cameos. They do not light up the screen with their acting, but inspire a warm glow of appreciation for their place in the real game. Included are Johnny Unitas, Y. A. Tittle, Dick Butkus, Bob St. Clair, Irving Fryar, Warren Moon, Terrell Owens, Barry Switzer, and Ricky Watters. Follow our link to the great official website that fully documents the making of the movie and the role these great men played.

We are all tainted with racial prejudice, sexism, self-serving greed, temptation, imperfections, and yet the game goes on, often despite ourselves, but with a strange kind of nobility. In the midst of the game, there are many who hold to an honor code so that on any given Sunday, they might rise above themselves.

Website

Wow. This is the best we have seen. It is complete with lots of information and perspective and yet captures the pumping feel of the game and the movie.