Review: Any Given Sunday

Oliver Stone’s film moves with the testosterone-fueled aplomb of its subjects.

Any Given Sunday
Photo: Warner Bros.

Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday moves with the testosterone-fueled aplomb of its subjects. The football field is Stone’s backdrop for a series of broad societal observations about what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a black man in the world of competitive sports. Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), the daughter of the fictional Miami Sharks’s deceased owner, is ruthless and money-hungry, a grotesque representation of a woman hyper-masculinizing herself in order to fit in with the big boys (Charlton Heston, as the team commissioner, refers to her as that “woman who would eat her own children”), and Ann-Margaret is funny yet tragic as Margaret Pagniacci, a dinosaur from less enlightened days where women were conscious of their place in the societal pecking order. But it’s Stone’s portrait of Willie Beaman’s (Jamie Foxx) rise up the superstar ladder that is at the core of the film, which acknowledges greed as capitalist death trap. Stone nearly pummels his film into nothingness with the film’s up-close-and-personal trips to the football field (bones crunch and bodies spin to the point of distraction), but the orgiastic insanity feels fitting—another one of his riveting mad rides through the shady tunnels of corporate America.

Score: 
 Cast: Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Quaid, James Woods, Elizabeth Berkley, Lauren Holly, Matthew Modine, Aaron Eckhart, LL Cool J  Director: Oliver Stone  Screenwriter: Daniel Pyne, John Logan, Oliver Stone  Distributor: Warner Bros.  Running Time: 162 min  Rating: R  Year: 1999  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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