No Touchdown, Yard Remake Still Scores

Those that read my reviews on a regular basis already know I’m not much of an Adam Sandler fan. His movies (save Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant “Punch-Drunk Love,” which isn’t a Sandler picture) are moronic and stupid, the majority so venal I imagine watching paint dry to be more entertaining than sitting through one of them again. So I’m sure it will come as a surprise when I say the star’s latest is a fun, amusing and pretty darn funny (if ultimately not entirely successful) comedy.

What is more surprising, and my friends who know me intimately and my favorite flicks ad nausea will probably fall over in shock, is that this success comes in the form of a remake. Not just any remake, mind you, but in a remake of one of Burt Reynold’s crowning glories, 1974’s “The Longest Yard.” Dirty, foul-mouthed, brutal and unmistakably misogynistic, “Dirty Dozen” director Robert Aldrich, along with stars Reynolds and Eddie Albert, were still able to craft a football comedy of astonishingly brutal hilarity. It’s an aggressively flippant picture, saluting the status quo with all the idiosyncratic sincerity now left to the creative minds behind such television shows as “South Park” and “The Daily Show.”

The last thing the world really needed was Sandler’s take on disgraced football quarterback Paul Crew (played iconically by Reynolds in the original). No matter, we got it anyhow, and somehow, someway, the star and normally hack director Peter Segal (“Anger Management”) manage to make it work much of the way through. The plot’s fairly simple: Crew’s thrown into jail for a three-year stint for destructive behavior regarding his girlfriend’s (a supremely annoying Courtney Cox-Arquette) luxury automobile. Once there, he discovers the warden (James Cromwell) is a football enthusiast who’s penal team (led by a wasted William Fichtner) is consistently one of the best in the state.

Crew and the warden hit upon a novel idea – why not have the former professional put together a cadre of inmates to play the guards in a practice game? With really no choice in the matter, soon the ex-quarterback and a cagey inmate known by the moniker Caretaker (Chris Rock) are assembling a team of buffoons ripe for slaughter by their more seasoned captors. But through a series of unforeseen events and behind the scenes maneuverings, Crew and Caretaker, along with the help of wizened prison vet – and a former NFL pro himself – Nate Scarborough (Reynolds, giving the film much more than a cameo), manage to scrounge together a tough-knit group of convicts ready to pummel to guards into submission. With the stage set and triumph no longer assured, will the warden allow the QB’s team to humble his men or will he instead use every dirty trick at his disposal to force Crew to fumble victory away?

Silly stuff, yes, and not exactly a picture full of wondrous and pristine morals I’m sure we’d like to pass on to youngsters. But so what? Not everything needs to be politically correct, after all, and much of Albert S. Ruddy’s story and Tracey Keenan Wynn’s original screenplay mange to shine through just as much now as they ever did back in 1974. “The Longest Yard” is still a dangerously vicious and archaic comedy, one with the temerity to stick its middle finger straight up towards conventionalism, laughing wickedly while it pummels you into humorous submission doing so. While there are one or two themes a person could probably take away from all of this, for the most part they’re all lost in the thunderously wicked on-and-off-field collisions.

Not that Sandler, Segal and new writer Sheldon Turner don’t mess it up from time to time, there is plenty here I neither liked nor found amusing. First off, Cloris Leachman’s nod to Bernadette Peters is crassly unfunny, the wonderful character actress degrading herself for absolutely no reward whatsoever. Also, while this might be Segal’s best job as a director to-date, that’s really not saying much for this is still an erratically slapped together movie that can never find a consistent tone, the filmmaker resorting to a grab-bag of editorial slight-of-hand to mask his inadequacies. Worse, the trio is so insistent about crafting a non-R-rated feature they continually pull their punches, leaving much of the story’s darker material and tendencies completely alone. Unlike their predecessors, they lack the guts to push this tale to the envelope turning what could have been a genre-busting satire of political correctness into nothing more than passably amusing riff on an old-school classic.

There’s more I could harp on. From Tracey Morgan and his team of she-male cheerleaders to a slew of homophobic rants that go way beyond what’s called for to an opening so insipid the average moviegoer would be hard pressed to make it through the first ten minutes, “The Longest Yard” has plenty against it. And yet, the movie is funny, at times gut-bustingly so. Better, the immensely talented Rock finally gets a chance to embrace a character worthy of his talent, the comic turning Caretaker into the laugh-inducing heart the piece needs to survive. Besides, any chance to see Reynolds slap back on the pads and strap up his helmet is worthy of at least a brief salute to nostalgia, the veteran action star playing his part here with a charming graciousness much of the rest of his recent performances have sadly lacked.

Sure it’s not art, but who says comedy has to be? Sandler, for once at least, made me sit up and laugh which is sure as heck more than I can usually say for him. It isn’t much, and considering he’s remaking one of my all-time favorite adrenalized comedies it probably shouldn’t be, but surprisingly it’s still enough. “The Longest Yard” might not score a touchdown, but it does at least manage a thirty-five yard field goal.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)