2005 / 109 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

“The Longest Yard” is yet another remake that really has no reason to exist. I never saw the original movie with Burt Reynolds, but I did see the first remake of this movie: when it took place in England, concerned soccer instead of football, starred Vinnie Jones and was called “The Mean Machine”. The plots are the two films are pretty much identical, the characters are basically the same except for the accents and the sports being played, and there are some clever moments in both.

The clever moments in “The Longest Yard” (2005), however, are probably all derived from the original source material, as they are the same in both remakes. Therefore, I don’t think you can really attribute a great deal of creativity to this film.

Adam Sandler stars as Paul Crewe, a washed-up former football player whose glory days are long past since he was indicted for shaving points in a major game six years before. He is the kept, trophy husband of shrill bitch Courtney Cox (displaying more cleavage than I thought she had access to) and right there we have to suspend a great deal of disbelief. Someone with this cleavage could do much better in the trophy husband department than Adam Sandler. Hell, pretty much anyone could. I mean, look at the guy. Yeah, he’s occasionally quite funny, but he sure ain’t a looker. He’s got a head shaped like a football, beady little eyes and a huge nose. Brad Pitt, he is not. But oh well. Moving on: Sandler gets pissed at her one night, after a great deal of drinking and too much truth-telling, and drives her expensive sports car around San Diego. She reports it stolen, he gets pulled over, he’s been drinking, he drives away, a chase ensues, the sports car is destroyed and Sandler goes to jail. As soon as he arrives in jail (it’s the sort of movie prison where the guards are all sent directly from the seventh circle of Hell and their idea of a leisure activity is beating people with billy clubs) he is beaten by a vicious guard (William Fichter) and told not to participate in training the guards’ football team. Then he is asked to do so by the warden (James Cromwell, in “evil mode) and told that he must help train the guards’ football team. The poor bastard doesn’t know what to do. Eventually he agrees to help train the team and suggests that the guards play a scrimmage game against the cons for practice. The warden agrees (if he had a moustache he would twirl it, I’m sure) and soon Sandler is assembling the toughest mothers in the prison into a football force of extraordinary magnitude, each one of them more than willing to bust a few guards’ heads open during the course of the game.

The assembling of the team and the training of said team are pretty routine. If you’ve ever seen a sports movie or a movie where someone whips a motley crew of reprobates into shape, then you’ve seen most of this stuff before. There are some allegedly zany character types on the squad (they are types rather than actual characters, the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to flesh any of them out), each with a particular talent and/or easily identifiable quirk. There’s the guy who can get McDonalds food for anyone in the joint, there’s the guy who’s bad at football and possibly gay (hey, it’s prison, when in Rome…), there’s the fat guy, the huge Indian guy, the fast guy (played by Nelly, who probably gives the closest thing there is to a performance in this movie) and others. Chris Rock soon helps Adam with the training, playing the usual Chris Rock role and saying things like “Can a brother get some hustle” and “that boy’s got slave feet”. You know, the usual Chris Rock shtick. Also on board to help out is a washed up, former Heisman trophy winner played by washed up, former Oscar nominee Burt Reynolds. Burt coasts through this movie, relying on charm that has, unfortunately, dried up over a decade ago. He proves, once again, that “Boogie Nights” was really just a fluke. By the way, have you noticed how disturbing Burt’s plastic surgery looks? He just looks way too smooth, like a burn victim with a bad skin graft. It has nothing to do with the movie, but it’s pretty damned creepy.

At no point does this movie coincide with reality. Pretty much every plot development could only happen in a movie (and a pretty far-fetched one, at that) and every character is about as thin as the paper on which the script was written. Most of the comedy falls flat (there are some good moments about a guard whose steroids have been switched with estrogen- the side of his steroid bottle is even helpfully labeled “Anabolic Steroids”, as I’m sure such illicit substances are in real life- and the cheerleading squad made up entirely of sissy convicts is a nice touch) and all attempts on the part of the filmmakers to generate drama and suspense are undermined by lazy screenwriting. When a character dies, it means nothing unless that character has been established. If he’s nothing more than a one-dimensional caricature, then his death is meaningless, as it is here. All of the usual sports clichés are on display: the third act obstacle, the sad-sack players being turned into top-notch athletes, the motivational speeches, and the big game. You could go into this movie with a checklist, really, and have most of them crossed off by the time the end credits roll. I wouldn’t have minded the rote nature of the movie so much if it had at least provided a lot of hilariously dumb, Adam Sandler humor (like his other good sports movie “Happy Gilmore”) but, as I said, most of the humor just doesn’t work. In fact, it’s like the filmmakers have barely even bothered. “The Replacements” was pretty predictable as well, but it had a certain spark and energy that is woefully missing from this film. And critical punching bag Keanu Reeves was far more human than any of the automatons in this film.

The big game at the end is the best part. Despite all of the movie’s problems this section somehow generates a good deal of laughs and even some dramatic tension. But the rest of the film just doesn’t support it. It wouldn’t really have to, if the film is as likable as past Sandler efforts like “Mr. Deeds” and “Big Daddy”. Unfortunately, this film lacks that level of likeability. Sandler is a likeable guy, even here, but he can’t overcome such ultimately hollow material. The movie has a wildly inconsistent tone, as well. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t know whether to make a serious film (after all, there is a major character’s death and the film has as many guard-administered beatings as “The Shawshank Redemption”) or the usual Sandler frivolity. They seemed to have compromised and made a film that satisfies neither.

A good remake ultimately must have a point in being remade: this one doesn’t. It’s not awful, it’s just redundant.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2005 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.