For years, Hollywood movies treated American football as the frivolously heroic side of university life, to be gently mocked in Harold Lloyd's The Freshman and the Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers, to be romanticised in Good News, where bluestocking student June Allyson helps star campus quarterback Peter Lawford with his academic work. A darker view of the game began to develop in the 1960s, starting with Richard Leacock's pioneering cinéma-vérité documentary Football, a penetrating study of the national dedication to winning as evinced in the lives of two rival high-school coaches in Miami.

TV coverage helped professional football gain widespread popularity. The Vietnam War made its militaristic aggression seem more resonant than baseball. The Nixon gang's obsession with the game and its ferocious rhetoric gave it a metaphorical significance. In Robert Aldrich's anarchic comedy The Longest Yard (aka The Mean Machine), the most striking in a cycle of 1970s football movies, the prisoners of a Florida jail take on the guards at football and we're invited to recognise Richard Nixon in Eddie Albert's sports-obsessed prison warden.

Since then, most pictures have been hostile to the game, especially when dealing with high schools, where (as in Varsity Blues) coaches are shown to be authoritarian sadists and the game to be physically and morally damaging. Now with the long, fierce, hammering Any Given Sunday, Oliver Stone has set out to make a sporting epic where football is an image or microcosm of the American Way, indeed of life itself. Every human predicament is here, and every convention or cliché of the sports movie.

The picture covers half a season in the year 2001 of the aptly named Miami Sharks, a major team doing badly. Jack Rooney (Dennis Quaid), the ageing white captain of a predominantly black squad, has suffered yet another back injury. A rising black star, Willie Beaman (Jamie Foxx), disregards the prearranged plays, thus threatening the team's success but promoting his own career and expressing his racial defiance. A cynical doctor (James Woods) keeps the athletes going with injections, much to the disgust of his new assistant (Matthew Modine), who seeks (for a while at least) to bring the Hippocratic Oath into the changing-room. The media, in the form of a TV sports reporter (James C. McGinley), exult in the team's failure and exploit every on- and off-field conflict.

Meanwhile the club's owner, Christina Pagniacci (Cameron Diaz), who's inherited the Sharks from her father, is determined to prove she's as ruthless as any man and is considering an offer for the franchise from a Californian consortium. To keep the price up, injured players must be kept on the field and victories secured. 'I do believe that woman would eat her young,' says a National Football Commissioner played by Charlton Heston.

The movie may treat of cynicism and corruption, but Stone is a great romantic and at the centre of his movie is a bruised idealist. The middle-aged coach, Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), is another Stone father-figure. Physically diminutive, he struts like Gulliver in Brobdingnag among his team of giants. Tony is tough, histrionic, manipulative. He's sacrificed his life and family to the game and looks back sentimentally to a golden age when handshakes, not lawyers, forged the bonds between men. But he still believes in teamwork, in the triumph of character, and in life (which is to say football) as a moral struggle. 'On any given Sunday you're gonna win or you're gonna lose,' he says. 'The point is - can you win or lose like a man?'

Any Given Sunday is a vital, agitated movie, with a vast range of characters. It's complex without being subtle and keeps up a constant barrage of incident and information. For instance, you might expect an intimate dinner at Tony's opulent apartment, during which the coach is trying to imbue Willie, his young black star, with the need to develop self-respect and a selfless dedication to his team-mates, to be a quiet, reflective sequence. But Stone keeps cutting in full-screen shots from Ben Hur, which is playing on TV in the background. The galley scenes speak of slavery and exploitation, the chariot race of the crowd's love of violence and bone-shattering injury. And if this wasn't enough, the footballer has to remark: 'They were the gladiators of their time.' Nothing goes unsaid in this film.

Though many of the underlying strategies on the playing field will be lost on British audiences, Any Given Sunday is an exciting and involving movie that might well have appealed to both Karl Marx and Sir Henry Newbolt. It also holds you right to the end, because the final credits unfold over a key sequence that contains surprising developments that round out the story.