Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a vicious little review from our main man with a dictionary in his hand, Mr. Beaks. He's usually a little bit of a coquette with good lookin' gents like Adam Sandler... but then again, I think it's easy to see why Beaks is so loyal to the original... No one beats Burt Reynolds in his heyday. No one. He is the sweatiest of all Gods and it's easy to see why there's an orgasmic twinkle in Beaks' eyes whenever you bring up WHITE LIGHTNING or DELIVERANCE. Enjoy the review!
Memo to Brad Grey and the other newly anointed muckety-mucks at Paramount: you’re going to make mayhem on Memorial Day weekend this year with your Adam Sandler toplining remake of THE LONGEST YARD. The young, multi-cultural audience with which I saw the film last Friday received the film as if it was the defining motion picture of their lifetime. They laughed, they cheered… hell, I even heard some phenomenally sorry sap whimpering during the burial of one of the picture’s supporting characters. Considering that the biggest laughs are all in the trailer, you would appear to have that crucial 19-35 demographic on lockdown, with only the second weekend of EPISODE III: SCARY HAPPENIN’S and Dreamworks Animation’s latest likely abomination, MADAGASCAR, to siphon off customers. Provided you don’t shank the marketing, a $60 million four-day should be well within reach.
I’m conceding all of the above just to let *you* know that *I* know it doesn’t matter what I say about this stubbornly unimaginative piece of shit. No matter how offended I am that you closely hewed to Sheldon V. Turner’s cut-and-paste job of Tracy Keenan Wynn’s screenplay that I eviscerated RIGHT HERE a year ago, it was pretty obvious even then that this was never intended to appeal to anyone with a fondness for Robert Aldrich’s original. Rather, it’s a movie made by a very rich and very powerful movie star who wanted to make believe he’s Burt Reynolds on the studio’s dime, and didn’t want to work too terribly hard to tailor the project to his sensibility. To that end, all is triumph.
That said, though Sandler’s popular sensibility may owe a great deal to the rowdy and vulgar sports flicks of the 70’s like THE LONGEST YARD, SLAP SHOT and CADDYSHACK, this is the first time I can recall that anyone has had the temerity to remake one of these classics with such lazy slavishness (thankfully, the opposite is being done on Richard Linklater’s very promising THE BAD NEWS BEARS). While I’ll assume Sandler’s heart was in the right place – it must’ve been, since he finagled the participation of surly old Burt Reynolds, who’s now in the Michael Conrad role – what he’s done here is dishonest. At least Gus Van Sant was attempting some misguided postmodern gesture with his shot-for-shot PSYCHO retread; Sandler and company are brazenly gambling that most of today’s teenagers and twentysomethings haven’t even heard of the Aldrich flick; thus, allowing them to purloin each memorable bit with impunity, their looming box office windfall assuaging their guilty consciences.
The greatest surprise is how successfully Sandler’s indomitable affableness counteracts the preposterousness of his playing an ex-NFL stud quarterback. This is the meager, but valuable virtue that keeps the film from tumbling toward true debacle status. A bit beefier than normal, Sandler imbues his Paul Crewe with the same shuffling, head-down, half-grinning charm that’s been his bread-and-butter over the last several movies, and it works given the unremitting burden of shame that’s dogged Crewe since he earned a lifetime ban from the league for throwing a game several years earlier. Fed up with his social climbing girlfriend (a Courtney Cox cameo notable for a cleavage shot so egregious, I bet it was storyboarded), Crewe takes a drunken, GTA-esque spin through downtown San Diego which leads to his improbable incarceration in a Texas penitentiary, where he’s bribed by the football obsessed warden into coaching an inmates’ team in a scrimmage against the guards.
The casting of James Cromwell as the warden is a curious choice; he’s got a wicked height advantage on Sandler that leads to plenty of awkward framing and makes it impossible for the star to appear intimidating in the manner Reynolds was to Eddie Albert. The guards are well-cast, however, with William Fichtner calling the shots, backed up by a mixture of football and wrestling greats including Bill Romanowski, Kevin Nash, Steve Austin and the only name that really matters, Brian Bosworth. They all get their licks in on Sandler, who absorbs their worst with superhuman resilience.
Chris Rock heads up the inmates roster as Caretaker, and continues his string of alarmingly unfunny film performances spiked with tired adlibs. He’s outdone in the acting department by Reynolds, Michael Irving and (this is gonna hurt) Nelly, and demolished in the comedy department by Terry Crews as Cheeseburger Eddie, a scrounger with a magical flair for smuggling an unending supply of McDonalds into the joint. Tracy Morgan also turns up as the cross-dressing leader of the prison sisters, but aside from some uncomfortable innuendo with Nicholas Turturro, he’s not given much to do.
Director Peter Segal struggles throughout to strike a consistent tone, and he’s hamstrung by (I’m guessing) Sandler’s insistence to incorporate most of the major beats from the much rougher Aldrich film into what is otherwise your typically broad Adam Sandler comedy. These sensibilities do not mesh in the slightest. For example, in HAPPY GILMORE, the dispatching of Carl Weather’s mentor figure was played for mean-spirited laughs; in THE LONGEST YARD, a similar moment is played comparatively straight-faced, and it’s horribly incongruous.
As for the game, it’s brought off with suitable bone crunching intensity (hooray for second unit!), but it’s a depressing spectacle for anyone who knows and loves the original movie, particularly since this it’s a tame PG-13 reproduction with not a single f-bomb in earshot (though they did improve slightly on the script’s inane “I broke his freakin’ neck”, I must confess that “I think I made him shit himself” still isn’t all that funny despite my audience’s howled approval). There are embellishments – e.g. Chris Berman, teamed with a laconic Native American convict, broadcasts for ESPN – but they’re neither inventive nor funny; indeed, everyone seem too enamored of the original’s efficiency to bother messing with what’s worked once before. By the time the final walk to pick up the game ball is staged with predictable fidelity, the film’s failure of imagination is complete.
Though the studio and filmmakers are positioned to reap a small fortune with this picture, no one should be proud of this dubious, hopefully one-time accomplishment. The remake craze is already a pernicious manifestation of this town’s creative bankruptcy; there’s hardly a need to resort to outright theft. However, if y’all are in this make believe Burt Reynolds market for good, how’s about casting Ben Affleck in SHAMUS? Or Matthew McConaughey in W.W. AND THE DIXIE DANCEKINGS? Or Shawn Kemp in PATERNITY? Ridiculous notions, to be sure, but a perfect fit, I think, for such a contemptuous methodology.
Faithfully submitted,
P.S. While I’ve got your ear, I’d like to give a shout-out to a small, under-promoted indie called FABLED, which opens in Los Angeles today at the Beverly Center. After debuting at the 2002 Austin Film Festival, the picture struggled to get released despite a terrific central performance from Desmond Askew, probably best known as the scene stealing, Tantra practicing Simon from GO, and sharp visual composition from first-time filmmaker Ari Kirschenbaum. It’s moody, atmospheric stuff. Check it out.
