previous column	deadlyhippos home	next column

The Longest Yard Review
6/3/05
by Shaw

For the second day in a row, I put up yesterday's column late yesterday, so I want to add a link to Clay's excellent third installment on weddings so you may access that one here. Of course I should also remind you of the excellent response sent in by Clay's wife Lara after his last wedding column. That one is here. In fact you will probably be doing yourself a favor by just sticking with that column instead of reading what's printed below. I don't recommend reading any further into my column. That's because I'm reviewing the worst movie ever.

The evening started off well enough. I was at some friends' house--they had surprised me by calling and asking me to come over and test out their new barbeque. When I got there, we had filet mignon wrapped in bacon. I mean it doesn't get much better than that, right? Without that telephone call I would have been eating pop tarts, or only marginally worse, nothing, for dinner. So then I got cavalier and I decided I would suggest our next move--I said, hey you know I've been wanting to see that new Adam Sandler movie. I had seen one or two commercials for it and it looked okay, and then I saw that it beat Star Wars Episode III in the box office on Saturday night, no small feat. The reviews were mostly neutral to positive, good enough for me.

Unfortunately I forgot to take into account the fact that Star Wars was a piece of crap, and that Adam Sandler's last football movie (The Waterboy), was also a piece of crap, which I hated even though I saw it drunk on a liquor concoction that I snuck into the movie theatre in a coffee cup 6 years ago. Lesson learned.

The movie starts off with a trailing shot of a woman's bikini-clad rear end. Knowing that this movie is about a bunch of guys in a prison, you have to immediately be questioning whether you're in the right movie theater, but then you remember that Adam Sandler's character is supposed to be a football star prior to his entering prison, so it's okay. Unfortunately this is the last pleasant moment in the movie.

Somehow, Adam Sandler's character Paul Crewe became a lazy drunk after getting kicked out of the NFL. He gets arrested for drunk driving and resisting arrest and this offense gets him time in a Texas maximum security prison, where the guards are involved in some sort of football team. The guards include some former pros and some former college players that didn't get drafted. While verisimilitude is not a strong point in most Sandler films, this is already a little ridiculous. I could probably only name about 10 white college players, but somehow the entire staff of the prison is white. And racist. And huge. And racist. And mean. And racist. The cast of football-playing guards includes: Stone Cold Steve Austin, Bill Romanowski, Kevin Nash, and Brian Bosworth. The captain of the guard and thus the captain of the guards' team is the sometimes excellent actor William Fichtner.

The starting pay (I looked it up) for a Texas prison guard is $18,000 a year. For this sum of money, the prison guards both watch over (which, in this movie, means beat up) the prisoners, and practice football on a 2 million dollar turf field in view of the prison yard that is no doubt fully funded (and happily) by the Texas state government. My first question is: if all the guards are on the football team, who watches the prisoners when the guards have practice or a game? I realize that asking questions like this is pointless but it all contributes to the ridiculousness.

So guess what happens. Seriously, guess. I'll wait.

Actually, you don't need to guess, because you've seen this movie before. Except it wasn't about football, necessarily. Here is what happens:

Tim Robbins/Adam Sandler/Robert Redford/Denzel Washington has trouble finding a spot in the lunchroom. Tim/Adam/Robert/Denzel meets a really nice black guy named Red/Caretaker, played by Morgan Freeman/Chris Rock, who is also the man on the inside that knows how to get things. Red/Caretaker gets him in with the guys, and eventually people come to grow and respect the man that was once an army general/famous boxer/football player/banker on the outside. Along the way he makes friends with a huge, jacked black guy who is kind of lobotomized and dumb but can heal people with his hands/tackle guys really hard. He also meets a huge Native American/Hispanic guy who is basically mute but helps him out in his time of need by joining his football team/killing him after his lobotomy. Tim/Adam meets with the clearly evil warden played by James Gandolfini/James Cromwell/Bob Gunton, who asks him for help. He needs help doing his taxes/training his football team/getting respect from the men. Tim/Adam/Robert/Denzel says no thanks. Tim/Adam/Robert/Denzel spends a few days in solitary confinement/the hotbox. Andy/Paul/Robert decides to help the warden but secretly plans to go behind his back and betray him at the same time. Everything goes well until Caretaker/Tommy/Aguilar is murdered by the guards, and then all the prisoners team up to beat the guards.¹

Did I mention this movie was billed as a comedy? I feel I should impart that up until this point not a single funny thing happened. So far there is only one joke, which is Chris Rock saying "I was so bad at football they used to pick me after the white kids." No one in the theater actually laughed at this. It seems like this line was just added as an afterthought, like the director noticed that there were no Chris Rock-style racially motivated jokes, so he wrote in this one thing so the black people would laugh at the white people joke, and white people would nod their heads in the audience saying, "Oh hey, that's that black comedian guy." "You mean Dave Chapelle?" "No, man, that other one." "Oh, yeah, the guy that played Ray Charles!" "No, the other one, the one from Pootie Tang." "Oh, I never saw that." That is the last time Chris Rock really does anything funny in this movie, which is too bad because he is, in general, one of the funniest men alive. I wonder if his Academy Awards censors are following him around everywhere he goes now.

The only other joke in the movie is the constant appearance of Tracy Morgan as the head of a group of prison transvestites that eventually become cheerleaders for the football team. Ha.

There is a series of Bad News Bears-style practices during which it becomes clear that the white boys will never win on their own, so Adam Sandler has to go try to recruit some black players. After a failed one on one battle for respect on the basketball court, he succeeds only in recruiting Nelly, who is, of course, a genius runningback who is never tackled in practice. Then after witnessing Nelly's massively racist encounter with the guards, the other black guys decide to join the team and are, of course, awesome, and the guards are all of the sudden nervous.

Do you see what's happening here? Every element of this movie is part of a formula. What the hell happened to Adam Sandler? Remember Billy Madison? Remember Happy Gilmore? Mr. Deeds? Remember Saturday Night Live? After Spanglish, Anger Management, and the 6th different version of the Hannukah song, I am starting to wonder if these movies are just some bad ideas from an otherwise funny guy, or if it's the other way around. I refuse to even discuss the specifics of the plot of this movie even more. After all, you can surely guess it.

Of course, they win the football game. Which somehow was televised by ESPN. Of course, Adam Sandler's surliness is gone and replaced with a love of his team and the game of football.

This movie also does that thing they do in remakes where they have the original come back for a cameo, i.e. Burt Reynolds plays basically the same character he played in the original but 30 years later. Also not funny, not believable, and just ridiculous.

There are three lessons in this movie:

1. All prison guards are huge evil racists.
2. All inmates are wrongfully imprisoned innocents who deserve a second chance in life.
3. Black people are better than white people at all sports.

Maybe 3 is true, but as for 1 and 2, come on. I think this really is the worst movie ever. I was actually apologizing to my friends in the seats next to me. Stay home, cook up a 50 cent batch of popcorn, and rent Happy Gilmore.

___________________________
1. This is of course the hybrid plots of a whole bunch of movies that were actually good, like The Shawshank Redemption, The Last Castle, The Green Mile (which also stars James Cromwell as a prison warden), Hurricane, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Discuss this and any other column deadlyhippos.com column at our message board.