Rating: 
Summary: IN YOUR FACE SMASHMOUTH FOOTBALL!
Review: This is a good(not great)movie about modern-day life on & off the gridiron.It touched on lots of taboo(read:nfl doesnt want to let the public in on)subjects:ie>drugs(legal & overprescibed)uncaring owners,less than super-hero players,sex,violence etc.. Al Pacino is as always,superb! The rest of the cast is outstanding as well(especially Jim Brown & Lawerence Taylor).This movie as u can tell is somewhat based on the Miami Dolphins & Dan Marino & is a sad commentary on how sad the NFL still is behind the scenes.For my money the best movie(far superior to this is North Dallas Forty w/nick nolte & mac davis.This film was based on a book by a former Dallas Cowboy & had the same problems w.the nfl(refusal to use team names etc)see it just to witness john matuzak(the RAIDERS)as a over the top lineman...man that guy was intense! All & all A.G.SUNDAY should play over & over again to be fully absorbed due to its CRASH/STYLE filming,but its worth the time & money!
Rating:
Summary: great movie - for football-fans!
Review: If football is your favorite sport, i guess this would be your favorite movie! If not - it's not a "4" for you but still a good movie. What me dissapointed about "Any Given Sunday" was the "Eye-Scene" (if you've not seen the movie yet, you will know when you've seen it) and the shootings of the players-faces when they run (that's too much - headache guarantee for the viewer).
Rating:
Summary: Football,Cortisone,Adrenaline and other chemical imbalances
Review: No one can accuse Oliver Stone of being original. In 1987's Wall Street he took the age old story of a youngster being seduced by money and power and turned into one of the most scathing attacks on heartless Capitalism. So predictably Any Given Sunday doesn't really have anything new to say, just a lot of old things to shout. One negative review of the film said "Stone directs like a deranged rooftop sniper". And with full frontal nudity, severed eyeballs on the feild and a general air of violent intensity it is clear that the film is excessive. But that is also why it works. Stone manages to give the viewer that voyeuristic delight of a peeping tom who's only allowed to look at something for two seconds before he pulls the camera away. As he did with JFK and NIXON, Stone uses every camera angle concievable, but unlike those two films Any Given Sunday never really becomes a flawless whole. The film tells the story of the Miami Sharks head coach Tony D'amato(Al Pacino looking very angry). His team is on a losing streak, his quarterback(Dennis Qauid) is injured and is replaced by the talented but ego-centric Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), who according to D'amato "may sell a lot of T-shirts but is ripping the team apart". Now D'amato has got to battle this kid, the greedy ice cold team owner (Cameron Diaz) and a corrupt team doctor who lets injured players on the field despite fatal risks and then justifies it to himself with twisted morality(James Woods). The scenes between these four principles are stunning, and even there Stone refuses to let the camera sit still. It might have been a wiser descision to tone down the off-field scenes. Any Given Sunday may seem from its reviews as a tradional sports movie, with the big game ending and bonding theme. While it has those, it far too cynical and ambitious to be just about that. Just incase you don't get it, Stone gives you images of Ben Hur (Football as the modern Gladiator arena) and even casts Charlton Heston as the league comissioner. And ofcourse you get the prescribed dose of anti-consumerism ranting. In final analysis, Any Given Sunday is not a great film or a historical achievement. But its frequently inspired, always fixating and exhausting. When it hits, it hits very hard.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Football Movie ever
Review: When "Any given Sunday" first came out in the theaters me and all of my friends were very excited about seeing it. My god we wasted our money! This movie was awful and it gives the great director Oliver Stone a bad image. This movie basically just focused on the lockeroom scenes. There was probably around 10 different lockeroom scenes and all of them were very nasty and perverse. This much nudity should not be shown in a R rated movie, not only that but the language was terrible. The ending was stupid because the viewers never got to see what happend in the playoffs. If some of the shower scenes were cut out, maybe we could have seen what happended in the playoffs! This movie is very bad and does not compare to the great football movies like "Unnecessary Roughness" and "Varsity Blues." I do not recommened this movie to anyone. Unless you want to see a good plot gone bad!
Rating:
Summary: American Football, Al Pacino, anger. Any Given Sunday rules
Review: I'm from England, so I know squat about American Football, but a cast like that and a director who has consistently impressed over the years with various epics could not be resisted, but an American Football movie? I entered the cinema with visions of such "classics" as Necessary Roughness and Wildcats. But then it took hold and I suddenely realised that this was as much of a war film as any other, grown men no longer battle for control of land but for a small, seemingly insignificant ball. Oliver Stone has shot these sequences with all the grace and subtley of a work of art and they are at once beautiful, yet devastating. However his visual flair is undisputed and at its heart, Any Given Sunday is the same old hat so far as sports movies go - that is, predictable. But the films key is that it wallows in this predictability and gives it a new spin, whereby the story is not considered anywhere as important the characters - underneath its surface of violent, epic recreations of football games,Any Given Sunday is an immensely effective and satisfying character piece. All of the characters have a depth and reality most American filmakers can only dream of. Even the bit parts are well explored - James Woods is marvellous as the physio torn between the health of the players and the success of the club, and Matthew Modine, perfect as his apprentice constantly questioning these crooked ethics. LL Cool J has little to do but makes the most of his screen time, by sheer awe inspiring size. The two largest parts fall to Cameron Diaz - the tough, modern female head of the club - and Al Pacino - the old school coach. Both are magnificent with Diaz almost proving a match for the master - who once again turns in a performance that sustains his status as the one and only king of shouting. The standout, however, is Dennis Quaid - finally getting the material he so deserves, delivering a touching, perfectly judged performance as the beleaguered, aging quarterback. I would strongly recommend even non-football fans to see this film, it shows a director willing to break the rules by actually creating a marvellous character piece enwrapped in a veil of gritty, beatifully shot and incredibly violent American football games, and a cast who fit their well-written roles perfectly. A triumph.
Rating:
Summary: Oliver Stone is back. Finally.
Review: Forget the well-written script, forget the acting, forget Oliver Stone's best direction work in years, forget an almost-perfect ensemble cast, forget gorgeous (if overdone) cinematography, forget perfect sound. Well, don't forget it, I guess, because we'll come back to it, but put it in the back of your head for a while. The true star of Any Given Sunday is the incredible choreography. A good deal of this movie takes place on the gridiron itself as twenty-two men pound each other into submission every Sunday. Bones strain and crack, blood flows, muscles and ligaments tear, and it's all captured oh so lovingly on film. It's difficult to watch for a non-football fan like myself (don't know any football fans who have seen it yet, so can't comment), but even while flinching at the sound of a body hitting the ground after being battered by two even bigger bodies in midair, it's still visually stunning. Just the football scenes alone would be enough to lift this movie to above-average status. That said, Any Given Sunday just plain rocks. It's the story of a whole lot of seemingly morally bankrupt people whose lives have been negatively affected by football. Coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) has been with the Miami Sharks since their beginnings, and quarterback Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid) has been there with him for well over half the team's existence. But Rooney is thirty-eight, well beyond the normal end of career for a football quarterback, and as should be expected, he goes down one too many times and screws something up in his chest. String 2 QB goes down after one play with a knee injury. That leaves D'Amato's third and last hope, a benchwarmer named Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx). Beamen ignores the playbook, calls his own plays, and turns the team around. Of course, in favoring one receiver and trash-talking (deservedly, it should be noted) the team's defensive line, he makes a whole lot of enemies inside the club, with the expcted results. Add to this shortlist the team founder's widow (Ann-Margaret), an alcoholic whose sole desire is to get away form the game, and daughter (Cameron Diaz), the team's present GM, who also wants to get away from the game, but with as much money as she can get for selling the team. Despite the fact that every one of these folks gives an excellent performance (save the woefully miscast Diaz, who does the best she can with her role), the one person in this film who truly shines in the role of "person whose personality has been completely warped by football" is Cap Rooney's trophy wife, Cindy (Lauren Holly). The woman is a flaming, gold-plated, iron-balled, moneygrubbing PBFH, and Holly plays the role to the hilt. This leads me to believe that switching Diaz and Holly would have been in the best interests of the film; Holly would have made a great shady GM. But you play with what you got. Another person to single out is Jamie Foxx, who's always been relegated to minor comedic roles before this. Stone threw him in with the big boys here, and many of them (Pacino, Quaid, James Woods and Matt Modine as the team's orthopedists, etc.). Foxx holds his own. It's not an Oscar-caliber performance, but like Jim Carrey last year, Foxx showed he's more than capable of playing a dramatic role and playing it well. Hopefully this will be the breakout role for Foxx. He's helped by a minor cast and a bunch of football-related cameos who obviously love being here. None of them looked familiar to me, save football great Lawrence "L.T." Taylor as a rival coach who spends more time taunting Pacino than he does coaching his own team. As for Stone, what's he doing here? Maybe he finally realized what the rest of the world did, that he went way off the deep end after Platoon. If this is his attempt at atonement, he bought himself a few centuries' worth of indulgence. The politics here are the politics of teamwork, aside from a minor subplot with Cameron Diaz soaking Miami's mayor for money for a new stadium. There are no ludicrous conspiracies, no embittered war veterans, no high-profile politicians to be ridiculed, only a bunch of people who have been pushed to the limit by a sport. It's The Godfather without the Mafia, and Stone handles it as capably as he's handled anything. The style is the same-- lots of darkness, gloom, and somewhat glorified violence-- but it's nice to see it applied to something nonpolitical for the first time since his highly-underrated horror classic The Hand. So having praised it to the high heavens, what's wrong with the movie? Why isn't it the greatest film of all time? A few minor things, mostly. I've already mentioned Diaz. And some of the cinematography-- if you cut out all of the slow-motion long bomb passes except for the first one, the movie might have been fifteen minutes shorter (and it runs well over two and a half hours). The soundtrack, while oddly effective, gets annoying after a while; you hear a lot of songs, and it's a great mix of stuff spanning the sixties to Kid Rock's most recent single, but you never hear more than a few seconds of any song. Even the now-banned "Rock and Roll Part Two" gets a few bars early on. Excellent filmmaking, especially when held up against the last seventeen years of Oliver Stone's career.
Rating: 
Summary: I'll watch it any given day of the week!
Review: Let me just say, I'm not a huge football fan, but this was as exciting as any movie I've seen in the last couple of years. The acting was great, especially the vastly underrated Dennis Quaid as the fading star quarterback. The action was awesome and it actually had a STORY outside of the whole football angle. Pick it up, it's worth it!
Rating:
Summary: HOLDING THE LINE
Review: Pacino has had a fast-packed year (The Insider etc) but an inspired one. Any Given Sunday, an unobvious choice for him, is a triumph over precedent: sports movies rarely work for the mass audience (Le Mans exemplifies the problem), but this one does - by dint of Pacino's subtleties holding solid in the face of Oliver Stone's manic directing. Which is not to disparage Stone, or his developing, unique style. Hard to conceive that Stone started so modestly - remember that awful 1981 Michael Caine flick, The Hand, which he wrote/directed? - but heartening for would-bes to know what can come by immersing oneself in the study of film and aligning oneself with an ace team. Hank Corwin, a frequent Stone editor (whose style is encapsulated in the best Nike commercials), contributes something to the breathless dash of Any Given Sunday (though he is not its editor). At the start this buckshot mood of flash cuts and multi screens is irritating - until one surrenders to the fact that we are, in fact, on the field and inside the NFL here. The script is hokum at times, but the force of the film is like an athletic work-out. Go with it, and you are as exhausted and fufilled as veteran player Dennis Quaid at the end. Stone himself appears in a Hitch-style cameo, and pulls it off. Cameron Diaz sails close to the wind in daytime-soap mode, but grows into the part. Ann-Margret seems unnecessary. But it all holds, and, like Jerry Maguire, may grow with viewings. But Pacino .... Pacino. When it comes to acting, there's the man!
Rating:
Summary: Wham! Bam! It's Oliver Stone!
Review: Mr. Stone is back to give us another wham-bang, whipsmart exercise in editorial brilliance. This is the man who delivers cinema in its most visceral sense. Go for the football sequences, go for Pacino, but most of all, go for Stone at his most flamboyant. First of all I'd have to say that if you don't enjoy the game of American Football then you probably won't like this film. You'd respect it yes, but enjoy it? I don't think so. For us Europeans, Stone personally cut the football scenes back by around 12 minutes. Mostly fouls and the such. Apparently, we don't understand the game. But do these hurt (Stone has said that they actually help the film) these scenes? Hell no. The games are staged, shot and cut like no other. It's edge-of-the-seat stuff for nearly three hours. Stone blends black and white, dissolves, slo-motions, voice-overs, freeze frames, into one hell of a package. This is every trick in the book, and then some, being thrown at us at once. This is film editing 101. This is directing at its most exciting visually. Can you tell I liked it? That it has strong acting throughout doesn't hurt, either. Pacino is great - as always, Diaz is good as the team owner, James Woods, as the team doctor, delivers a quite wonderful turn. Hell, even Charlton Heston turns up at one point. Ladies and gentlemen, this is cinema. It's cut to the bone. It makes no delusions about what it is. It's one hell of a ride.
Rating: 
Summary: Excess Ain't Success
Review: If you live for football you might enjoy all or some of this movie. But, even football fans might find it tedious and distorted. It seems that very few directors have ever recreated a game or match of any kind that simulated a real one. I've even argued with writer-directors over some of the choices they were making under similar circumstances, so I know why and how they tend to go amiss. Too, often, it's about a writer-director's overriding need to service the plot. This one's over the top in terms of manipulating game play and I can only guess that it came from director Oliver Stone's desire to glorify his theme, the game of football. So, he's a fan. So, a cooler head should have prevailed. While Cameron Diaz is worth watching in any movie, and it's fascinating to watch her assaying this role of a dominant, professional woman, there's little onscreen to engender sympathy for her as a character. What this story is about, anyway, is the emergence of a young football star with great natural skills and how he mishandles the relationship side of success. It's potentially an involving idea, but for most of the movie he's completely unsympathetic and there's no other single character that provides this vital element. That, and over-extended montages of game play, over-extends what this movie should sustain in screen time. It's bloated by an hour in length and 20 decagrams in testosterone. Rated O, for Overload.
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