Movies made about football often try to inspire the same feeling you get when you watch the actual game.
Filmmakers want to make you feel like you’re sitting in the stands, watching your favorite athletes compete for sports’ glory. They want to capture the joys of victory, the agonies of defeat, the warmth of sportsmanship, the endurance of brotherhood and all the fixin’s in between the hash marks.
No football movie ever made people feel like they needed a hot shower like Oliver Stone’s smash-bang trash epic Any Given Sunday.
Some movies, like Kevin Costner’s Draft Day, sought to make the NFL Draft feel like a Michael Bay movie’s worth of explosive intrigue. Other movies, like the Keanu Reeves comedy, The Replacements, wanted to buffet the classic underdog story with humor and locker room platitudes. “Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory lasts forever,” quoth Shane Falco.
You want a touching story about a high school football team overcoming the odds? Remember the Titans and We Are Marshall have your back. You want a far-fetched comedy that hinges on the stranger parts of the sport? Look for The Longest Yard and The Waterboy. Aching for something that makes you remember your heydays on the gridiron? Varsity Blues and Friday Night Lights fly off the shelves. Want to watch a dog go wide to win a football game? Meet Air Bud: Golden Receiver.
The list goes on and on: Rudy, Jerry Maguire, The Blind Side, North Dallas Forty, Invincible, Little Giants, Brian’s Song, The Game Plan, Leatherheads, The Last Boy Scout, Heaven Can Wait, insert your favorite here.
Some of those movies are fantastic. Some of those movies suck. However, they all have something usually in common. They don’t make you feel guilt.
Every now and then, a football movie will emerge from the tunnel and make you feel a little weird about your unfettered love of the sport. The Will Smith-starrer Concussion dealt with the rash of CTE that spread through the league and the NFL’s attempt to smooth it over. Patton Oswalt’s Big Fan dealt with the unhealthier sides of fandom and hero worship. James Caan’s The Program tried to show the darker sides of what can happen in a locker room. Last year’s overlooked National Champions imagined a world where two star players refused to play in a title game because of the NCAA’s regressive labor rules.
However, there’s nothing like Any Given Sunday.
Stone’s frenzied satire of the NFL continues to be the electrifying epitaph to a game that will, in all likelihood, one day crumble under the weight of its gladiator mentality. The JFK and Born on the Fourth of July filmmaker saw in 1999 a truth that still evades most of the league. Football, as exciting and financially lucrative as it is, is a barbaric, scuzzy contest of blood, sweat and tears that wears its athletes down to a fine powder and rewards their sacrifice with fleeting fame and glory.
While the game has shaped itself up a bit since Stone’s Miami Sharks took the field, the scathing satire he unearthed with Any Given Sunday continues to be prescient. It’s why this is the best movie ever made about football. It grits its teeth to tell you uncomfortable truths.
The film dramatizes a fictional Sharks, an organization on the decline with a legendary coach (Al Pacino’s Tony D’Amato) and new ownership (Cameron Diaz’s Christina Pagniacci). Stone’s NFL locker room isn’t the rah-rah den of sentiment seen in other films. It’s somewhere between a party bus and a wrestling ring, equal parts fearsome and debaucherous. On top of the Pacino and Diaz clash, Stone adds on a classic trope – a third-string quarterback takes to water after his improbable game play – and gives it a stylized edge.
The film deals with the uglier sides of professional sports –coaching/ownership struggles, Shakespearean togglings for power, ethical dilemmas around concussions and prescription drugs, the decline of careers in a sport ready to discard anyone not maximizing their contracts.
There aren’t many heroes in Stone’s NFL. D’Amato isn’t your typical inspirational sports movie coach, far more a foul-mouthed hot-head. Pagniacci is a power player ready to cut throats and ignore criminal activity to win games. Jamie Foxx’s underdog quarterback Willie Beamen is an arrogant jerk that’s hard to root for. James Woods’ Dr. Harvey Mandrake is the shady team doctor ready to carry out Pagniacci’s edict to put players in harm’s way. Only Dennis Quaid’s aging quarterback Jack Rooney and Lawrence Taylor (yes, that L.T.) fading linebacker Luther Lavay are easy to sympathize with.
Stone’s ability to wring the skeeze out of a multi-billion dollar enterprise wasn’t a surprise. Early in his career, Stone had as good of a knack as any to challenge powerful American enterprises with a lot of flash and substance. Filmmaker Adam McKay’s jump from studio comedies to sociopolitical satires owes a lot to Stone’s smash-edit, in-your-face style.
With Any Given Sunday, Stone took on the shield with a rusty dagger. It’s one of the bravest sports films of all time, if only because it actually tries to excavate the ugly realities behind the most popular sport in America. It’s a marvelous breakdown of football from all angles, so gloriously overwrought in a way that captures nearly everything about the sport that makes it such a strange, difficult, dirty, addictive monster.
That’s the catch, isn’t it? Even when we know about all the hazards and unethical dealings, we still tune in every week, amazed at what we’re watching. It’s a drug, just like any other larger-than-life spectacle. Stone isn’t trying to vilify football fans as much as pick up the big rock and show its supporters all the worms and grubs slithering around underneath.
There is a reason the film has stayed around as it has. Former NFL wide receiver Greg Jennings told Sports Illustrated that the film wasn’t that too far off from how the actual game plays out week-by-week.
“A lot of components in that movie that are just flat-out real,” Jennings said (via Slashfilm). “The concept of not playing, guys getting hurt, you being inserted, guys shooting up, doing whatever it takes to stay on the football field, getting the big hit, letting winning and their individual success divide them from the guys in the locker room, it happens!”
“The NFL was very nasty. They hated the script,” Stone told Entertainment Weekly in a 2020 oral history of the film. “They tried to kill the deal by telling players not to be involved.”
Notorious Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had to step in to help Stone even get a stadium to film in.
“We barely got the stadiums. Jerry Jones helped by telling them to f*** off and giving us Texas Stadium. It was a fight all the way,” Stone said in the EW piece. “And then when the film came out, the NFL went out of its way to completely blackball us. There was no coverage from the sports shows. It was not fun to fight them, it’s like fighting the Pentagon.”
The fact that the NFL got so up-in-arms about the film’s release speaks volumes. Not much scares the NFL, but Stone’s film did. It spoke truth to power, even when that truth was spiked with the most noxious concoction known to man.
Any Given Sunday is the best-ever football movie because it’s actually about football, and not the other way around. It’s decorated with a black eye and grass stains, but it’s never afraid to get back in the huddle. It’s one of the few sports movies to ever look the beast in the eyes instead of give it a belly rub.
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