Any Given Sunday

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

STARRING: Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone OPENS: Dec. 22

Basically, it's your mean, very mean, standard sports story: an aging coach (Pacino) who is on a losing streak; a great veteran quarterback (Quaid) whose winning spirit has gone south; a cocky kid (Foxx) who needs some life lessons before he can step into the starter's shoes. The up-to-date spin on this tale is provided by the tough and scheming owner (Diaz), who has inherited the team, the Miami Sharks, from her more benign father and wreaks a certain amount of nontraditional havoc before she gets some sort of comeuppance.

Director Oliver Stone, who wrote Any Given Sunday's screenplay with John Logan, may be momentarily in a nonpolitical mood, but that does not mean he has given up his preoccupations with paranoia, greed and the brutality of American life. He sees his warriors as innocent animals, the purity of their violent athletic endeavors under constant threat of corruption by people trying to make a buck off their pain. Or, in the case of a particularly noxious sports reporter (John C. McGinley), a know-nothing who thinks he knows it all, just trying to make a name for himself.

McGinley's relationship to the game is interesting. So is Lauren Holly's with the crippled quarterback, finally letting the inner bitch residing beneath her cool jock's-wife beauty savagely surface. The trouble with the movie is its style, all handheld shots and short, jagged cuts. They're supposed to represent the barely controlled anarchy of the sport (and to let Stone touch on far too many narrative points). But almost three hours of this jitter deteriorates from bravura filmmaking to annoying mannerism, and Any Given Sunday ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.

--R.S.