Touchdown

For what it's worth, The Longest Yard is a remake that seems to get it right. It stays faithful to the story while furthering the comic elements from the original. For one thing, there are transvestite cheerleaders in this one, which is not in the original film. But it's a comedy that lives up to it's standards as an enjoyable football comedy with absolutely no train of thought. It's a movie you don't have to interpret at all, except just enjoy, since it's an Adam Sandler movie.

This impressively expensive Sandler film follows the Sandman as Paul 'Wrecking' Crewe, an NFL has been with a serious dependence on both alcohol and laziness. He's married to a foxy witch (an impressively bosomed Courtney Cox), whose more selfishly into degrading him than actually appreciating him. Frustrated with her, Paul decides to take her prized sports car and screw it up more than he could ever anticipate. So much that he ends up in jail, in the care of a duplicitous prison warden named Hazen (James Cromwell). It's obvious from Hazen's introduction that he's the type of shark that can't be trusted, and judging from how his sadistic prison guards treat their prisoners, it's rightfully so. Hazen's a mean SOB and he just so happens to have a prized football team made up of his guards. In a political maneuver, Hazen wants Crewe to assemble a football team, which Crewe reluctantly does, to the behest of the guards. The guards are headed by a guy named Captain Knauer (William Fichtner), an equally mean SOB who does more damage to Paul with a nightstick than any of the other beatings he takes throughout the entire film. Paul agrees to do so, and assembles his team, along with the help of fellow convicts Caretaker (Chris Rock), and NFL legend Nate Scarborough (Original star Burt Reynolds).

With Adam Sandler movies, you know what you're going to get: a lot of goofy humor, oddball gender jokes, and physical slapstick. All of this is to be topped off with an ending that isn't so much happy as it is compromising, which is why the 1974 film might have been the perfect vehicle for Sandler. For an example, look at 50 First Dates in which Drew Barrymore's character retains her memory loss condition in the end, only she's happily married to Sandler's character; Or Big Daddy in which Sandler doesn't get to adopt the boy but the boy is left in the hands of his real father, who just happens to be Sandler's character's best friend. These are happy endings only with a compromising twist, much like The Longest Yard does. For it's surprisingly high $85 million budget (no doubt inflated by Sandler's price tag), it shows up on screen whether by the grungy set (it is a prison after all), or by the cast. Besides the addition of Rock, Reynolds, Cromwell, Fichtner, are a slew of other recognizable faces like rapper Nelly and wrestlers Steve Austin and Goldberg.

The Longest Yard is an enjoyable summer flick about sportsmanship and football. At the heart of it is Crewe, proudly rounding up the soldiers to square off against the guards. All these guards possess talents (not to mention funny quirks), which the writers put to good use. While there are a few lapses of juvenile humor, The Longest Yard is a well rounded football comedy with a little more maturity than most of Sandler's movies. A lot of the Sandman's earlier works feel a little contrived and forced, as if to put some jokes just to cover up missing parts of the story. But in this film, they keep moving with the jokes being a welcome addition, but not a main plot point. As for the original film, this remake is worthy of it, since it keeps the story intact with maybe some minor changes. But The Longest Yard is a relatively good movie, for anyone looking for a good time.