As I waited for Oliver Stone's newest film Any Given Sunday, set in the brutal world of pro football, to begin, I wondered which Oliver Stone would show up for the game. Would it be the edgy auteur who liked to push buttons in Platoon and JFK. or the uneven, unfocused director of U-Turn and Natural Born Killers? With his in-your-face style, Stone has secured a place for himself in the pantheon of American directors, but even he stumbles every once (or more than once) in awhile. That is certainly the case with Any Given Sunday, whose annoyingly heavy-handed technical gimmickry overshadows what passes as a story.

Football and Oliver Stone aren't necessarily subjects you'd put in the same sentence, but apparently, Stone is a huge football fan. He is also clearly a guy's guy. This movie fairly drips with testosterone, which Stone has embraced to the exclusion of his usual political fire. In fact, the script, written with John Logan, never gives us the glimpses of insight usually prevalent in Stone's films. He paints football players as gladiators and equates the turf to a battlefield. He tells us it's a ruthless sport that has become more business than pleasure. Tell me something I don't know.

For their story, Stone and Logan have gathered a uniformly average group of characters: The over-the-hill quarterback Cap (Dennis Quaid) and the rookie Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), the old-guard coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) and the take-no-prisoners team owner Christina(Cameron Diaz), who is always at his throat. All these folks lock horns over one long, tumultuous season, which after two hours starts to feel like a tumultuous lifetime.

When Cap gets injured, Willie proves his mettle in the last few minutes of a game, only to rise quickly to fame and struggle with its attending egotism. He makes music videos, breaks up with his long-time girlfriend and disses the other team members, illustrating the best way not to ingratiate yourself to others. As for Tony, he's a man who's getting tired, a coach who has seen it all, especially the way what was once a gentleman's game has become a business. Tony fights with everyone -- with Willie for being a snot-nosed kid, with Christina for being a cold-hearted businesswoman -- but mostly, he struggles with himself for getting old and holding onto past glory.

Pacino is his usual explosive self, not nearly as fine-tuned as he was in this year's The Insider, but still effective. The real surprises are Diaz and Foxx, both of whom play against type and do a gutsy job of it. In fact, the performances here are uniformly strong, but they aren't enough to elevate this film beyond Stone's manic self-indulgence. He simply needed to be reined in on this film and he wasn't.

So what does this movie offer? A lot of football. Perhaps, too much. Frankly, after I'd seen a slo-mo close up of a football spinning through the blue sky for the fifth time, I started to get bored. Yes, Oliver, we get it. Poetry in motion. More like style over substance. Stone spends so much time romancing the sport on the field and engineering the film with a grating, wall-to-wall soundtrack (you can't hear half the good lines) that he forgets to show us the soul beneath the game.

Worse yet, in the few moments when the characters really start to connect, he tends to lose himself in razzle-dazzle camera work. The most blatant use of this is in the scene where D'Amato and Willie have it out and their argument is intercut with scenes from Ben Hur and various fancy-shmancy camera angles. I found myself praying that these poor actors would get a chance to connect, but they never did due to Stone's need to show off his bag of technical tricks and his "insight" that -- news flash -- being a football player is like being a gladiator.

Technical hoo-ha aside, the real trouble with this film is that it never takes a unique stand -- and it spends three hours doing it. Honestly, is there any sports movie whose story needs three hours to be told? Stone is at his best when he's fired up about something and wants to convince us of his opinion. Even when you don't agree with Stone, his point of view is always fascinating. But here, there is no point of view. Instead, in an attempt to move us, Stone fills the time with witticisms like "life is a game of inches, just like football" and "either we heal now as a team or we will die as individuals." Pithy? Nope. Just standard locker room hype. And here, hype is the operative word.