It may just be me, but Oliver Stone can not prove to me that he is a serious movie director. Nothing he made since "Talk Radio" is worth a second look. I even downright boycotted some of his films, like "Born on the Fourth of July", because I never felt any sincerity in anything he made. His obsessions with Vietnam war, with the conspiracy theories of the American government, his persistance in imitating the more contemporary styles of the younger directors such as Tarantino (whose story for "Natural Born Killers" he so savagely mutilated into an unwatchable movie), all these things are more the product of a frustrated mind that produced a few good movies ten years ago than a maverick director who wants to make a difference in moviemaking.

His latest effort is a welcomed step away from Vietnam and the horrors of Washington. "Any given Sunday" is a movie about football, and it tries to take a different angle on the whole circus of the sport. Now, bear with me here – a team from Miami is called Sharks, the one from Dallas is Knights, and to stay consistent with the medieval theme, LA team is California Crusaders. Of course, Stone himself is a cynical sports announcer, with none other than NFL outcast Barry Switzer as a color analyst (people in Dallas started leaving the theatre at this point). The ultimate game is not SuperBowl, but another ancient reference – The Pantheon Cup. The final insult to the viewer's intelligence is the endless quotes from "Ben Hur" and depiction of football players as new age gladiators. And let's not forget Charlton "I used to be Ben Hur, but now I'm the chief of NRA" Heston himself, this time as the righteous Commissioner of the league whose acronym I failed to memorize (AAFA or something). So, now we have a movie about football which is abandoned by real-life football to the degree that the title had to be so vague, as to imply that, although based in the season 2001, it can happen "anytime, anywhere".

The movie is bad, because it is not credible. Just as Pacino's bad-boy quarterback, who has to persuade his teammates in the huddle that he changed to a fierce leader and the unlikely hero. And excuse me, how do you cast Cameron Diaz as The Bitch and get away with it? Also, can I really spoil the movie by telling you the outcome of the big game, in which the big guy upstairs is looking down through the "hole in the roof" and shines a light on the doomed linebacker? Oliver Stone is using this movie to connect to his audience on such a primitive level that it made me puke just like coach's jambolaya is making the bad-boy QB do his pre-game ritual. At least I know enough about football to know that there is no coach in the world who would go for it on fourth-and-one on enemy's 20-yard line, up by 4, minute and a half to go. Kick a field goal, Oliver! It may not be a part of your movie, but it's a part of the game, you know....