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MTV Films strikes again—this time with a
remake of the 1975 sports classic The Longest Yard, which launched Burt Reynolds
to Hollywood superstardom. The star of this version is Adam Sandler—which will keep you
remembering him in The Waterboy.
The plot is pretty basic. Paul
“Wrecking” Crewe (Adam Sandler) is an ex-pro football quarterback who was kicked out of
the league after he was indicted for point shaving. He’s living with his overbearing
girlfriend (Courteney Cox, whose breasts get more screen time than her face), and when
he’s finally had enough of her, he takes her expensive sports car out for a joy ride.
The problem is that he’s drunk and manages to take out about half a dozen police cars
before the chase is over. That’s a pretty clear violation of his probation, so off to
jail Crewe goes. The warden (James Cromwell) runs not only the prison but also his own
semi-pro team made up solely of guards. His team is four years removed from its last
championship, so he pulls some strings to have Crewe sent to his prison to get the team
back on track.
The warden forces Crewe to form a team of prisoners for a
warm-up game for the guards’ team. None of the prisoners with any talent want to be a
part of the team, which means we get a handful of predictable scenes of Crewe attempting
to entice his fellow inmates to play. He’s befriended by Caretaker (Chris Rock) and
‘Coach’ Nate Scarborough (Burt Reynolds, who played Crewe in the original film), and he
finally gets a team put together. After that there’s the big game and the outcome is
exactly what you would expect—only without any suspense or real motivation to get the
characters there.
During the entire movie I found myself comparing it to
the original—and it came up short almost every time. The original was a great movie,
with rich characters that grew and changed during the course of the movie. The script
gave them real personalities, and the actors delivered believable performances. This
time around, the script is shallow, and the actors phone it in. Sandler and Reynolds
both look more bored than anything else during every scene.
I’ll admit
that the jokes are funnier this time around—and for once Sandler lets other cast members
get some of the laughs. Rock has some great one-liners, and he seems to be ad-libbing
his way through the worst parts of the script. Pro-wrestler Kevin Nash has some
scene-stealing moments as a prison guard whose steroids get replaced with female
hormones. Tracy Morgan is gut-busting hilarious as a drag queen cheerleader for the
prison squad. But the laughs aren’t enough to save the movie. And there’s no
satisfaction in the ending, which comes off flat and forced.
The next
time Adam Sandler makes a movie, he should work harder to make the viewer want to connect
to his character. If he keeps making movies like this one, 50 First Dates
may end up being the high point of his career.
