Any Given Sunday is a full contact, in-your-face, funny, dramatic, thoroughly entertaining movie about life in pro football. Oliver Stone turns his attention from the '60s for a change -- providing instead an essay on the necessity of teamwork in sports and how paradoxically, pro sports, by its very nature, undermines teamwork.

Al Pacino stars as Tony D'Amato, head coach of the fictional Miami Sharks, a down-on-their-luck franchise who play in the crumbling, decrepit Orange Bowl -- they're having trouble competing with the crosstown Dolphins. It's yet another great performance in the bag for Pacino, who already knocked one out of the park this year with The Insider.

Dennis Quaid plays the aging, Jack "Cap" Rooney, a Dan Marino-type quarterback who's past his prime. Jamie Foxx, getting to show he can do more than just comedy, plays the young third-stringer Willie Beaman who threatens to replace the veteran. Former NFL great Lawrence Taylor essentially plays himself as a linebacker who's held together with cortisone shots. When it comes to acting, L.T. doesn't embarrass himself -- he even gets a nice monologue.

But it's the intense football scenes that are the most memorable aspect of Any Given Sunday. Stone shows us the frenzy and ferocity of the field action from the player's point of view -- but he also does a good job of showing us how the game is run: from inside the huddle, to the line of scrimmage, to the offensive coordinator in the booth who's sending-in the plays over the headsets.

The film also stands as a tribute to the game. If James Earl Jones' speech in the last act of Field of Dreams said everything that ever needed to be said about baseball -- then Al Pacino's gridiron oratories here are the football equivalent.

This is easily the most commercial film Stone has made in years. Thankfully, he shot most of it in the same 35mm format (his past films have annoyingly jumped around from color 35mm to black and white to 16mm); Stone also wisely tones down his trademark editing style of symbolic intercutting between incongruous images. But there are times when Stone still manages to overdo it. During one key dialogue scene about the nature of quarterbacks, the movie splices in quick clips of the chariot race from Ben-Hur, which is conveniently playing on a nearby TV. The first time we see this, the message is clear: football players are the modern day gladiators. But after making his point, Stone keeps cutting to the Ben-Hur stuff -- almost ruining the rhythm of the scene.

But foremost, Any Given Sunday is about how the business side of the sport fuels selfishness, which works against the fundamental concept of teamwork. This is represented by Cameron Diaz, as the Shark's cold, calculating owner and Beaman, the egotistical rookie. Stone's satire is very subtle -- it's effective because it's not over the top. It's Stone's attempts to ring drama from the situation, however, that come off as overwrought. If the movie were a game, I'd say Stone's team won -- but they barely covered the spread.