“The Longest Yard” runs a reverse play but gets thrown for a loss.
| Fourth and long: This remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds prison-football movie suffers from being a comedy first, drama second. That, and Adam Sandler (in the Reynolds role) is not the man you want delivering the rousing halftime speech.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, language, subject matter. Now showing: tk |
Let me draw it up on the blackboard with X’s and O’s. The 1974 film “The Longest Yard” was an exceptionally entertaining movie about a football game played by prisoners against guards. Robert Aldrich directed with bare-knuckle prowess, and Burt Reynolds had one of the best roles of his mid-’70s heyday.
It worked because it was a drama that served up a multitude of bruising laughs. The new remake of “The Longest Yard,” however, is a comedy first of all – and because of this, it strains to pull off the serious moments in its final half-hour.
That’s the reverse. Loss of down, no instant replay.
The new one has – deep breath – Adam Sandler in the old Burt Reynolds role: Paul Crewe, a former pro quarterback who got drummed out of football when he threw a game for money. He’s shipped to the pen for drunkenly wrecking his girlfriend’s car in the opening sequence (which features Courteney Cox Arquette, or more precisely, her cleavage).
The bleak desert prison is ruled by a warden (James Cromwell) who likes to win football games with his team of guards. He goads Crewe into assembling a squad of prisoners to play the guards in a warm-up game.
That’s the plot – the warden and his toadies make things hard for Crewe, who nevertheless collects his team of rejects and sociopaths. It all leads to the climactic game, but you knew that already.
A measure of this movie’s feebleness is that it brings on Burt Reynolds for a supporting role and can’t even get a kick out of it. It would be great to see Reynolds go crazy with a role like this (he’s the team’s grizzled coach), but he looks as tight as the stretched skin on his face.
Like the first film, this one is full of real-life jocks. NFL thug Bill Romanowski and Seahawk flameout Brian Bosworth are in there, as are wrestlers Steve Austin and Bill Goldberg. Former U-Dub Husky Bob Sapp, who has lately found fame in Japan as a wrestler-kickboxer, is likable and engaging.
From another world entirely is the hip-hop guy Nelly as a running back. He looks a little lost.
Chris Rock plays Crewe’s sidekick, Caretaker, a role that is supposed to be an emotional catalyst. But as funny as Chris Rock generally is, we can’t invest any care in him because he’s not an actor – he walks through scenes and tells jokes. The one heartfelt exchange between him and Sandler is all right, but it feels inserted merely to set up a subsequent scene, not because it’s part of the flow.
If this movie had any bedrock, maybe Sandler would come off better, too. He looks handier with a pigskin than you might think, but he’s not the actor you want giving a rousing halftime speech. Moving from comedy to drama turns out to be the longest yard.
Chris Rock, Burt Reynolds and Adam Sandler in “The Longest Yard.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
