Crush Groove (1999)

In Oliver Stone's head-smashing football epic, Any Given Sunday, a player speeds toward the goal line, pigskin in hand, and two members of the opposing team line up to bushwhack him -- one flying in at shoulder level, the other down low. To describe this maneuver as a tackle would be to make it sound far more polite than it is. As the three bodies meet, in a series of horrifically exact yet splintered images, it looks as if the two defensive players are literally trying to rip the other guy in half, and to do so with the cold-crack precision of a death-sport videogame.

For most of the movie, I got the feeling that Stone was trying to do the same thing to the audience. Any Given Sunday is a vast and pummeling paradox -- a kaleidoscopic bone crusher. The movie is edited like that disarming scissor-cut tackle, the visuals coming at you from every angle, with an ultraviolent slice-and-dice suddenness. For two hours and 40 minutes, Stone rubs your nose in the raw animal aggression of pro football, filling up the screen with the game's potent destructive force. This is hypercompetitive, cutthroat filmmaking, an attempt by the director to wipe away all previous football movies with the relentlessness of his vision, the fluent speed-metal kick of his brutality. Any Given Sunday is jagged and alive. It has some bracingly authentic scenes set in locker rooms, groupie parties, and announcers' booths, and it features a major performance by Jamie Foxx. Yet the film's cumulative effect is as exhausting as it is exciting.

For Stone, the violence of pro football is a form of pure catharsis -- the ultimate in cleansing primitivism. It's the timeless spectacle of men pretending to be every bit as homicidal as, deep down, they really are. Here, though, it's football itself that gets pounded and degraded. Stone reduces the sport to its bloody brute essence (tackling, ground war, wrecked bodies), running roughshod over its dramatic, stop-and-go rhythms and shortchanging the diagrammatic ingeniousness of the plays. Even huge, beefsteak linemen and defensive tackles have to think about fakes and details, about psyching each other out; a quarterback's mind is a human radar screen. You'd barely guess that, though, from Any Given Sunday. Stone, at times, appears to be trying to demonstrate how the very texture of the sport has been ratcheted up into gladiatorial excess by the forces of a greedy, high-tech sports-media culture that broadcasts everything and finds meaning in nothing. He turns football into a barbaric drug and then says, in effect, ''Admit it -- you're hooked.'' Except that it's Stone who seems hooked on his own nitro flash-cut aesthetic. For all his virtuosity, he never quite lets us see the game.

Stone's patented image layering comes at us with far less precision than it did in Natural Born Killers or Nixon, but he must have been so jazzed by the prospect of filtering pro football through that style that he didn't worry about the cliche-bogged script. The film presents us with an aging coach, Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), who is still trying to lead the Miami Sharks, even though he's been rendered a relic by the new era of ruthlessness, both on the field and off. Tony spars, all too predictably, with the team's shrill, yuppie-princess co-owner (Cameron Diaz, doing the worst acting of her career), but his big battle is with Willie Beamen (Foxx), the replacement quarterback who gets a break after the legendary Cap Rooney (Dennis Quaid) is sidelined. Willie, who develops a bizarre ritual of upchucking on the field early in every game, isn't just a hotshot -- he's a new kind of player. He improvises, ignoring the playbook and even the coach's instructions; he's like a digital quarterback ruling a field that's still analog. Before long, he becomes a star, an endorsement god, even a hip-hop idol.

Foxx inhabits a bravado that's gripping in its icy power. Willie's swagger blazes through all lies, including the coach's, leaving only the residual ash of racial bitterness. The movie centers on Tony's attempt to break Willie, to tame his insurrectionary ways and teach him the old-fashioned glory of football. But what is it, exactly, that Willie has to learn? He wins games. That's all that matters; it's all that mattered to Tony's most celebrated role model, Vince Lombardi. In Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone traps himself in a contradiction between two brands of sentimental machismo -- the celebration of brutality for its own sake, and the old-school ''teamwork'' that the movie lionizes as victory, long after having demonstrated that it's nothing but nostalgia. B

-- OG

[BOX]

Any Given Sunday STARRING Al Pacino Cameron Diaz WARNER BROS. RATED R 160 MINUTES

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