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Adam Sandler as an NFL jock? We’re talking fantasy football!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The remake of “The Longest Yard” starts with a great end — an excellent rear-view shot of some girl in a bikini climbing out of a swimming pool.
Enjoy it, because once the movie heads to prison, the only “girls” onscreen have the same junk in their pants the other inmates do.
“Yard” kicks off at a party hosted by a rich harpy named Lena (Courteney Cox Arquette), who’s got a trophy boy-toy — former NFL quarterback Paul Crewe, played by, um, Adam Sandler. More on that later.
Fed up with what a [female dog] Lena is, Paul goes joyriding in her sweet, sweet Bentley, knocking back a six-pack nearly as fast as he drives. Then, right when he’s having the first bit of fun he’s had in a long while, Lena calls the law on him — a lot like my ex LaDonna.
Cut to half a dozen squad cars and one totaled Bentley later, and a stinko-drunk Paul tells her on live TV, “Hey Lena, I think we should start seeing other people.” (Good call — though having a baby did wonders for Courteney in the upstairs area, if you get my drift.)
Anyway, Paul gets three years’ jail time for the ride and for breaking probation for point-shaving on his old team. He’s not exactly popular when he gets to prison, where the chief guard (William Fichtner) decides to use him as his own personal punching bag.
Things get worse when Paul gets in trouble with the warden (James “Farmer Hoggett” Cromwell, who’s hard to take seriously if you’ve watched “Babe” as many times as I have with my boy Cal). The warden wants him to put together a football team of inmates to play against the prison guards.
A lot of “Yard” is about Paul having to recruit his Mean Machine team from a bunch of hoods who can’t much stand each other, but who agree to play so they can give the guards what Paul calls “the greatest [butt]-kicking fiesta in the history of football.”
The team includes a couple of giant guys who fill out a uniform but are a few fries short of a combo meal. And here’s the biggest problem I had. When you surround Sandler with real athletes like NFL-er Terry Crews, champion wrestler Bill Goldberg and this giGANtic power-lifter from India named Dalip Singh, it’s just hard to believe Sandler was ever an MVP, or that he can even drop-kick some pig. (And no, I didn’t buy him in “The Waterboy,” either.)
I mean, Burt Reynolds (the ORIGINAL Paul Crewe) shows up as the Mean Machine’s coach. And even though he’s getting on in years and has a face-lift that makes him look like an old Chinese lady, you still believe he knows his way around the gridiron. I can see Sandler in a stadium, but working behind a hot-dog stand. Him being a football star is about as believable as Drew Barrymore falling for him — TWICE!!! — in his earlier movies.
Oh well, I guess you have to suspend your disbelief a little in a movie like this. It’s not too hard to do with Chris Rock on board as Paul’s best prison pal, Caretaker. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chris Rock. But he’s never been what I’d exactly call BELIEVABLE as an actor. It always sounds like he’s about to remind the other inmates about the two-drink minimum before he launches into another stand-up joke.
For the most part, “Yard” is pretty funny. But there’s one scene where it tries to get all serious, and it falls flat. One of the prisoners gets killed and his friends bury him. But before they do, they leave little gifts on his coffin — and any chance the scene had to pack a punch gets lost when you realize it’s just an excuse to lay out a series of product placements for Ketel One Vodka and McDonald’s. There’s so many plugs for McDonald’s in this flick, you’d think the real star was Ronald McDonald.
Hey, that’d be fine by me. About the worst thing in the movie is this running joke about how much the ladies (including Cloris Leachman as a prison secretary with hair bigger than a VW) used to get turned on by Paul’s old underwear ads. You just know you’re living in a parallel universe when the idea of Sandler modeling a jock is supposed to do anything for the ladies besides help them revisit their lunch — am I right?
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