10 Movies That Would've Been Better In Different Genres
1. Any Given Sunday
What We Got: An Examination Of Race Relations in American Pro-Sports, Pro-Sport Superstar egos, male bravados, excesses of fame, excesses of the sports world, influence of corporate greed, family legacy, Warrior/Athlete mentality, brutality of American Football, Pro-Football team dynamics, and finally a character study of an aging coach.
What It Should've Been: A Character Study of Al Pacino's aging Coach, Tony D'Amato
"...and on this edition of when directors go to crap". Oliver Stone's gritty with a great ensamble cast, but overly bloated dissection of American Football and its excesses, marked the beginning of the end for Stone as a legitimate engaging director. His usual director's tropes are all here too, a giant cast, schizophrenic scene cutting and editing, use of different camera filters, gritty depiction of an American institution, the whole works. However, this the one where it all fell apart for him as a director, introducing so many interesting and engaging elements and then follows through with almost none of them. The best element in play here was Al Pacino as the grisled old coach trying to win one last championship, against all odds of course. Pacino delivers in every one his scenes, especially in the now famous "Every Inch" speech. The main problem is that the director tries to make this movie about... everything. There are so many characters to keep track of; there is Jamie Foxx as the arrogant and shallow back-up QB, Cameron Diaz as the glory-starved team owner, LL Cool J as the overbearing star running back, Denis Quaid as the injured veteran QB, Aaron Eckhart as the concerned team physician, and real-life Hall of Famers Lawrence Taylor and Jim Brown even have roles as aging football veterans.
It all adds up to wasting one of the very best later-career Al Pacino performances, as he is lost in a sea of characters, unfocused ideas and concepts in this directorial mess. Stone piles on so many ideas and concepts and then drops them in favor of more concepts about the nature of Pro-Sports, by my count about ten different movies could've been made from them, resulting in the unfocused jumbled cluster*uck of a film. The character of Coach D'Amato being the strongest element presented, if only most of these concepts were filtered through his perspective then a more fluid piece of filmmaking would have been made.
The two best sports movies ever made, in my opinion, are 2004's "Friday Night Lights" and the 2011 documentary "Undefeated", both chronicling a High School Football team's trials and tribulations during the course of a season. They are also about the pressures of winning, team dynamics, egos and brutality of the sport, but it is all through the eyes of their respective coaches that the audience sees all of that through. Thus, there is a connection to what is happening on the field because we personally feel the pain and suffering of the teams, we care about these players just as much as their coaches do. They say that any team takes on the personality of their coaches, they can also act as a tether to a spectator trying to understand this brutal world of hard-knocks.
That "Every Inch" speech that Pacino delivers turns out to be only a glimmer of what could've been if the coach had been the focus of the movie. As the engaging coach, much like in the movie, is lost in the shuffle of a director's bloated ambition.