Posted: 05/30/2005

The Longest Yard

(2005)

by Hank Yuloff

You remember the scene. Burt Reynolds drops back to pass and throws not one, but two perfect spirals into the crotch of a football ref who won’t give his team the benefit of the doubt. And him sitting on the bench with a bum knee that miraculously gets better in time. Classic movie. So Hollywood says, in all its wisdom, that it should be redone. Sigh.

In case you have not seen either, The Longest Yard is the story of Paul Crewe, former NFL quarterback who is arrested for drunk driving and thrown in jail for violating his probation that stems from an alleged points shaving scandal 5 years previous. The warden of the prison attempts to get Crewe to help him make his prison semi-pro team better through promises of an easier time in jail.

If it had not been for the original, this film would have gotten a decent review from me. I would have said that Adam Sandler (Anger Management, The Waterboy) does NOT look anything LIKE an NFL quarterback, and was completely miscast in his own production. And if there had not been an original, Burt Reynolds would not have been cast at all - much to the detriment of this edition. The 2005 version is good, but without having just re-watched the 1974 original, much of the character depth and story is lost. Still, it’s not a bad film, but being able to draw from the credibility of the first makes the second better.

The football footage is much better in this version. Advances in technology have made that possible. The set is better on this version - the prison looks like it was from the period of The Alamo, with the only beauty provided by a practice football field behind the warden’s office.

What’s worse? Director Peter Segal’s (Tommy Boy, Anger Management) inattention to the detail of the first, relying upon the first to make up for the holes in the second. In both versions, Crewe’s sidekick, Caretaker (Jim Hampton in the first, Chris Rock (Bad Company) in the second) is killed by a fellow inmate. In the first, we know that he is killed because the killer is jealous of the position that Caretaker has in the life of Crewe and that Caretaker was not the target.. In the second, it seems like he is ordered to kill him by a guard. And the timing for the Caretaker’s funeral seems odd. He is killed the afternoon before the game in the second edition, and they squeeze it in before they get on a bus the next day at noon.

Some details are changed, far to the detriment of the story. In both, Crewe is forced to have sex with the warden’s secretary in order to get what he wants. Reynolds, who played Crewe in the first, gets to rely on his sexy image to fool around with a young, hot, Bernadette Peters. Sandler, the comic, gets 79-year-old Cloris Leachman. It was so much better to hear Peters say that Reynolds is not the only one who is 50 miles from the nearest town. Both women have needs; one of them is believable.

The Warden in both (Eddie Albert in 1974, James Cromwell in 2005) are equally petty, politically motivated individuals - like we ever get our politicians from OUTSIDE a jail cell - and are equally shallow as personalities. In the 2005 version, Cromwell (The Green Mile, also as a warden) is given his own sidekick, that makes both of them seem cartoon like. And speaking of cartoons… WHY DID PRODUCER SANDLER HAVE TO TOSS HIS UN-FUNNY BUDDY ROB SCHNEIDER (Duece Bigelow, Idiot Gigelo) IN FOR A CAMEO???? It is a complete waste of time and almost stops the movie dead in its tracks when it should be at its most dramatic.

I liked that there are a couple of other actors that make it into the second version and it is good to see that tip to the original, but the 2005 version is so much less subtle (for example, the beatings from the guards are far more brutal in the second) that it takes away from the power of the finish.

Hank Yuloff is our senior L.A. staffer, and a much better actor than Adam Sandler ever will be.

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