Poll Position: Any Given Sunday (1999)

Yesterday the majority of North America watched the Super Bowl, congrats to all the Packers fans out there. But that doesn't mean football is over! No sir. You voted in the poll and you picked Any Given Sunday for a huge win. Directed by Oliver Stone and having a huge cast, I've often heard that this is one of the best football movies of all time. Now this is a long movie, and I have a lot to say about it, so prepare yourself. This one's a doozy. So, did I think Any Given Sunday was a touchdown, or a complete fumble? Hit the jump for all the action!


The first thing that smacked me in the face in this movie was the huge crazy cast. Al Pacino, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J, Dennis Quaid, and that guy that voiced Hades in the Disney Hercules movie! It even has Aaron Eckhart. You might know him as Harvey Dent/Two Face in The Dark Knight. And lets not forget the cameo by Charlton Heston, but more on that oddity later. This struck me as one of the strangest grouping of people I think I've ever seen in a movie. Now, perhaps some of these actors weren't as big or well known as they are now, I'm not sure exactly. But all the regcognizable faces, to be honest, kept taking me out of the movie. Hey look, LL Cool J is dressing like a pimp again! Hey look, Jamie Foxx is making a rap video! Hey look, that guy that sounds like Hades is being a douchebag again!

Hey look, Jamie is selling out again!

Maybe it's all just the fact that Oliver Stone is crazy. I mean, the amount of symbolism and deep meaning he dumps into his movies is absurd. It's no wonder this movie was 2 1/2 hours long, it's filled with all these side stories with all the different characters. To its credit though, almost all of those side stories are interesting. You even get to see Elizabeth Berkley topless a little more than half way through the movie. Jokes aside though, I really liked the story involving the doctors and the linebacker with the old neck/spine injury who is willing to keep playing and risk his life to get the bonus for his family.

Another hit/miss part of the movie was the soundtrack. Sometimes it really works. I don't want to think about the other times. It really hits a whole gambit of songs, from rap to rock, techno to the Mortal Kombat song. I'm not even making that last one up. It may not have the lyrics, but that's Mortal Kombat. But at the same time it's sort of understandable, it's a action packed song, maybe it gets played at football games? But this wasn't even the strangest part of the movie.

Pacino coaching his Miami Sharks... wait, what team was that?

The editing. What the hell was up with the editing of this movie? I've never been one to even be able to pick up on editing, but this movie does so much jumping around, back and forth to the strangest things sometimes. From a football flying in the air to a jet. From Al Pacino drunk rambling in the bar, to a painted picture of a dog in a dress. Lets not get started on the whole insane sequence where Jamie Foxx lets being quarterback go to his head and he sells out with music videos and commercials. We're talking picture-in-picture-in-picture time here.

Speaking of strange editing sequences, one of them involves an argument between Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx about what football means to them. Is it just about winning, or is there more to it than that, like the history of the sport? Anyways, while they're arguing, the screen keeps cutting back and forth between them, and scenes of Ben Hur, full screen, that's also playing on a nearby tv. If that's not weird enough, Charlton Heston, star of Ben Hur shows up later as the football commissioner! So, is this an alternate reality in which Charlton Heston is the commissioner, or does the commissioner just look strikingly like him?

At least the football is good

As much as I've just rambled and ranted about all these insane things about this movie, the football is actually pretty good. Pretty damn good. The game they play in the rain looks awesome. The hits are crazy, but this time in a good way. You fully believe they're out there getting the crap kicked out of them and playing the game. I just wish they had real teams and not the made up silly teams like the Crusaders and Knights.

After I finished watching the movie, I sat for a moment to think about it. There's a lot of good, and a lot of weird going on in this movie. And sometimes all that good becomes too much good and gave me that cluttered feeling. There's lots of messages in here too. About race, age, relationships, fame, teamwork and what it means to win. The action is pretty good, but it's also spaced out a lot by all those messages. Personally, I don't know if I could recommend this movie to anyone unless they were a really big football fan. If that's you, maybe you should give it a shot if you've got a few hours to kill.