Long Bomb
Adam Sandler cast as a former pro quarterback — that laughable setup is about the only funny thing about this pointless remake of The Longest Yard, which wasn’t a comedy in 1974 and won’t be mistaken for one in its latest incarnation.
After a string of films in which Sandler seemed intent on proving himself as someone worth taking seriously, even in light comedies such as 50 First Dates, The Longest Yard is a step backward and right over a cliff. It ranks among his worst efforts, which says something for a man with The Waterboy, Little Nicky, Billy Madison and the Mr. Deeds remake on his filmography. This redo of the film that was among the first in Burt Reynolds’ cannonball run to superstardom in the 1970s barely even qualifies as a movie; it’s more a pastiche of prison-film clichés bound and gagged in a loop of lazy montages. It could be called for roughing the audience.
The new Longest Yard is faithful to the original, yet without any hint of what made the ’74 movie work. The story remains exactly the same, save the inevitable dumbing down of a movie now bearing the MTV Films imprimatur. Tracy Keenan Wynn’s smart tale about defeat hiding in victory’s tall shadow is now just one more stupid Sandler movie, The Waterboy promoted to starting quarterback; what once was a sordid send-up of fame is now summer camp for former Saturday Night Live cast members (Sandler, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan, Rob Schneider) who get to hang with real pros (Michael Irvin, Bill Romanowski) and play catch for the cameras.
What’s most startling is that some guy named Sheldon Turner actually got paid to write this screenplay, which uses most of Wynn’s original without moving a single comma. The story remains the same: MVP QB Paul Crewe (Sandler, seriously) is a forgotten burnout who, having thrown a game long ago, now sponges off a wealthy, beautiful woman, played here by Courteney Cox Arquette and her breasts, which director Peter Segal ogles like a high schooler visiting a strip club for the first time. Fed up with being a boy toy — a “whore,” as model Anitra Ford called Reynolds in the darker original — Crewe steals her sports car, trashes it and several cop cars, and winds up in the clink, where the warden demands that he assemble a team of cons to play the semipro guards or wind up serving his full sentence. He relents, after a series of beatings, and leads the team to a victory that will surely feel like a loss: You don’t humiliate the screws without getting screwed.
Directed by Robert Aldrich, the original was smartly cast and deftly shot. Its football sequences, which eat up almost the entire second hour, have the rare feel of the real thing, perhaps because Green Bay Packers legend Ray Nitschke really was trying to tear off the head off former college baller Reynolds. Aldrich was essentially remaking one of his own movies, The Dirty Dozen: Crewe rounds up the prison’s mangiest denizens for his squad. Reynolds made for a wry straight man among so many crooked bastards, which made its happy ending that much more of a downer.
Whereas the original’s gags were efficiently deadpan, Segal’s remake strains to be funny. It’s also unbearably lazy — Sandler, aping Burt Reynolds’ every move with the disadvantage of not actually being Burt Reynolds, barely even registers here, so lost is he among the cardboard cut-ups (Nick Turturro Jr. and Tracy Morgan, playing so gay they’ve got to be committing some kind of celluloid hate crime) who populate this mess. Segal, maker of one good Sandler movie (50 First Dates) and one lousy Sandler movie (Anger Management), and first-timer Turner make so little effort that not even the guys on the field seem to be sweating. Reynolds shows, too, to collect a paycheck that might bounce if he doesn’t cash it before this bankrupt enterprise’s opening weekend.
