Any Day

Any Day is blessed with a proliferation of odd details, but writer-director Rustam Branaman doesn't seem to realize how strange they are, or how interesting they could have been if heightened a little. For instance: Of all the challenges that might confront a washed-up boxer fresh off a twelve-year stretch for a manslaughter rap, the unlikeliest might be the eleven-year-old school bully. Such is the weird life of Vian (Sean Bean), an ex-con who finds redemption by making pizzas. But instead of embracing, or really even recognizing, the oddness of his own script's details, Branaman makes everything as flat as Bean's laconic affect, the film's title, and its theme music ("Pensive Canon in D Major for Indie Drama," apparently).

Besides the subplot about a middle-schooler bullying a middleweight boxer, the film has a cameo appearance by legendary action film screenwriter Shane Black and a pretty girl who decides that dating Tom Arnold might be fun. Seeking atonement for his crime while repairing his relationships with his sister and her son, who was born while he was in the penitentiary, Vian gets his first post-prison job at a pizza joint managed by Arnold, whose sloppy charm pops against all this oblate dullness like the most interesting guy at a title insurance office. Fumbling toward Vian's redemption, Branaman stumbles, handling a tragic death and a ghostly visitation with fists of ham and the dialogue of a man born with no ears.