I don’t follow football too closely (a recent peek at the NFL standings made me exclaim, “Who moved the Cardinals to the NFC West, and why are they doing so well?”), but I recognize a deep hole when I see it.  The Miami Sharks are in a bit of a hole before Any Given Sunday even starts, and after a few minutes have gone by, that hole is transformed into a chasm.

In back-to-back plays at the end of the first half of the game, the fictitious Sharks lose their three-time league MVP quarterback - thirty-eight-year-old Jack "Cap" Rooney (Dennis Quaid, Playing By Heart) - and his inexperienced backup.  Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx, How to Be a Player), the third-string passer, is inserted into the game, but he pukes on the field before he even touches the ball and mistakenly lines up behind his right guard for a snap.  The Sharks lose their fourth consecutive game going into a much-needed bye week, appearing to be extremely far removed from the team that brought home the AFFA Pantheon Cup less than four years ago.

Coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino, The Insider) is understandably upset.  Not only is his team leader gone, but D’Amato also has to contend with the bitch-on-wheels team owner, Cornell business graduate Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz, Being John Malkovich).  The spoiled-brat daughter of the team’s former owner, Pagniacci wants a winning team in order to convince the city to give her a new stadium so that the team will be worth more money when she puts the Sharks on the market.  When Beamen shows promise in the quarterback position, Pagniacci orders D’Amato to play the flashy up-and-comer, despite his lack of respect for his coach and teammates.

Sunday concentrates more on D’Amato’s discord with Pagniacci and Beamen than it does on its football clashes, showing the game as more of a business than a sport.  Almost every character in this film is despicable in one way or another.  The players respect money and are more concerned with their individual statistics, bonuses and endorsement deals than they are with the performance of the team.  Their petty wives and girlfriends are even worse.  D’Amato wants only to win, despite the cost, while team doctor Harvey Mandrake (James Woods, The General’s Daughter) falsifies medical reports to keep players in and out of games, jeopardizing lives in the process.

While you may think that Sunday’s focus would be on the game of football, there is a lot more to the film.  Almost three hours more.  Director Oliver Stone (U-Turn) spends as much time off the field as he does on, realistically showing black players dressing like pimps (what normal person wears suits and top hats like this?), the effect of twenty-four-hour sports television on the game and, most importantly, the transformation of the game from the hard-nosed, old-school, Vince Lombardi style of play to the flamboyant personal style of today’s statistic-obsessed, drug-addled players.  Maybe it’s because two NFL stars have been arrested already this week (one after a nationwide manhunt), but this portrayal should be particularly alarming to the NFL.

The whole old-school/new-school battle is exemplified well here between D’Amato and Beamen, who seem to speak different languages at times.  Even though the final reel is full of every sports-movie cliché that they could dig up, the film is still enjoyable to watch.  Errrr…that is if you have a durable rear-end.  Toward the end of the film, D’Amato delivers a stirring locker-room speech to his team about the importance of inches on the field and how they needed to win the battle for those inches.  I couldn’t help thinking that if they had only trimmed about 10,000 inches of celluloid off of the final cut, it may have been a better film.

Stone’s Sunday, which he co-wrote with John Logan (Bats), is probably his most visual film since Natural Born Killers, which is mostly a good thing.  The game sequences are spectacular, especially during a playoff game when the final seconds tick off of the scoreboard in a highly stylistic fashion.  Part of making the movie look cool is shrouding the playing field in darkness, which just seems silly, and making sideline conversations audible despite an obvious lack of shouting.  I expected more shots of delirious fans, but Christ, that would have just slowed the movie down.  As it was, three major stars were cut out of the film at the last minute – Ed Burns, Tim Sizemore and Jim Caviezel all had roles in the film, but don’t actually make in onto the screen.  Sunday is believed to incorporate parts of former Oakland Raiders team doctor Rob Huizenga’s book “You're Okay, It's Just A Bruise: A Doctor's Sideline Secrets About Pro Football's Most Outrageous Team.”

Most of Sunday’s acting is pretty decent, with former players Jim Brown and Lawrence Taylor surprisingly strong.  The casting is amazing, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a wider gamut of actors in one film.  Did you ever think that you would see Charlton Heston and Bill Bellamy in the same movie?  I think that’s one of the signs of the apocalypse.  Ditto for Ann-Margret and LL Cool J.  Another apocalyptic warning is a football picture than takes almost as long as a real football game.  At least in real life you get timeouts for bathroom and snack breaks.

2:50 – for adult language, violence, nudity, drug and alcohol abuse and adult situations