Any Given Sunday Details

Oliver Stone offers his multi-camera perspective on American football in this bruising “us and them” drama. Essentially it's North Dallas Forty with a racial subtext, coated in Jerry Maguire feel-good sentimentality. But this ensemble masterclass is also a hybrid of Platoon and Wall Street, with Al Pacino even delivering a teamwork variation on Michael Douglas's “Greed Is Good” speech. It's no accident that the tin-helmeted players thunder into encounters resembling the beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan, for Stone considers them the cannon fodder in a militaristic stratagem, to be patched up and returned to the front by generals stationed safely away from the conflict. It's overlong, but has moments of explosive inspiration.

Stone has said the film was intended as a homage to Robert Aldrich, and it has as its subject the same aggressive, amoral masculinity and bonding of the two movies, The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard, that inspired it: the problem for many