The Longest Yard combines three of my least favourite genres (the prison movie, the sports movie, and the Adam Sandler vehicle), so I can’t claim much objectivity for this review. Having said that, though, it did make me laugh now and then.
Sandler plays Paul Crewe, a disgraced and drunken former football star who gets into trouble by stealing his girlfriend’s Bentley and is sent to jail.
He happens to end up at a prison where the chief warder is aiming to develop a great football team out of his group of vicious warders, and he demands Crewe’s help. Crewe suggests that the warders play a match against an ad hoc team of prisoners to warm them up for their bigger games — and give them an easy, morale-boosting victory. Crewe is then given the task of making a football team out of a bunch of motley prisoners.
You can see the whole storyline already, can’t you? Sports movies always favour the underdog, and the prisoner team here is obviously the underdog. We’re clear on that because the warders have been depicted indulging in various forms of gratuitous brutality. And the prisoners’ team is so mismatched and humorously incompetent that they can only be the underdogs. Crewe, of course, comes to see their human and/or footballing potential (the same thing in this context), and starts getting excited about the possibilities of this grudge match. Cue the inevitable process of Hollywood-style redemption. Who will win? Guess.
Between the moments of violence, the over-played caricatures and the casual homophobia dotted about to extort some laughter from the presumably sports-mad straight-man audience, there is the occasional laugh — and some thrills for those who understand American football, possibly the least intelligible of sports. Not that you really need to understand how it works; all you need to know is that it’s good guys versus bad guys, and the pay-off will be dragged out for as long as humanly possible. You know that when we’re excitedly told there’s ”30 seconds left!” of the game, those 30 seconds will last at least five minutes.
Every cliché you expect of such a movie is present and correct. The only mildly interesting thing in The Longest Yard is that Burt Reynolds turns up, as a nod in the direction of the original 1974 version of The Longest Yard (in which he took the Crewe role), and to show us how his plastic surgery is getting along.