Adam Sandler Goes to Fantasy Camp

Rating: Null/10 (9 October 2005)

The original Longest Yard had grit and style; the new Longest Yard has fake grit and non-style, and reeks of Vanity Project. The movie often seems little more than an excuse for Adam Sandler to hang out with athletes, to live out some kind of jock daydream in the company of real ex-football players like Michael Irvin, Bill Romanowski and Brian Bosworth. Athletes play at being actors, while actors (and rapper Nelly) play at being athletes - it's not a movie but some kind of two-way fantasy camp.
Sandler plays disgraced point-shaving ex-quarterback Paul Crewe, whose post-athletic life involves leeching off his well-to-do girlfriend (a plump Courtney Cox), drinking beer and watching TV. In a fit of drunkenness Crewe steals his girlfriend's car, then becomes involved in a televised police chase; his antics land him in a penitentiary in Texas where the guards have a semi-pro football team, and the warden is serious about re-claiming the championship. It's someone's bright idea that the prisoners should put together a team to play the guards as a tune-up; Crewe is put in charge of this endeavor, and sets about recruiting various thugs, psychos and hard-cases and trying to mold them into a team. Naturally this is all a character-building experience for Crewe, who has faced some maturity issues in the past. It also provides an opportunity for a lot of lame prison humor, jokes about homosexuality, penis-size and other things that are apparently hilarious.
Sandler tries something different here; he sets aside his usual sweet-hearted-class-clown persona and goes for something edgier, something less ingratiating. In the past Sandler wore immaturity as a badge - it was the thing that connected him to his audience, which is made up mostly of teenage boys and people who want to still be teenage boys even though they are in their thirties and losing their hair. Now Sandler seems less-willing to just play the fool; he's decided to grow up a little bit as a film star, and play a character for whom immaturity is not a point of goofy pride but an obstacle. The Longest Yard represents Sandler's departure-point moreso than Punch-Drunk Love, which was a small movie and therefore not really representative of the star's work. Sandler the actor may have grown-up in Punch-Drunk Love, but Sandler the movie-star hasn't tried until this film, which is too tottery and formulaic to work as much of a vehicle for his new, semi-serious concept of himself. Sandler may be trying to grow up, but the movie is still silly and backward.
The film is tailored to sports freaks, the kind of people who chant "De-fense" in front of their TV, think Tom Arnold is hysterical on The Best Damn Sports Show Period and dream of jumping in a hot-tub with the twins from the beer commercial ("I love/being a degenerate slob/ having the IQ of a doorknob/and twins!"). Sandler may be trying to depart from his old arrested-adolescent ways, but someone forgot to inform the writers and director, who go all out in providing Sandler's yahoo audience the kind of rowdy energy that seems to stir it up (lots of AC/DC on the soundtrack in other words). I'm not saying this kind of stuff can't be amusing - I like Caddyshack as much as the next person - but for it to work you at least need some halfway decent material, not a dried-up old '70s formula tricked out with modern references, testosterone-worship and a healthy dose of black-people-are-cooler-than-white-people cliché. Ooh look it's Dan Patrick only goes so far; at some point you need a joke that's actually funny, a comic rhythm instead of a string of weakly assembled gags. The surprising thing about The Longest Yard is how unfunny it is; outside of a couple of Chris Rock's ad-libs, there isn't much here that rises above the level of a mid-season replacement sitcom. It's fine if Adam Sandler wants to indulge some fantasy of hanging out with jocks and ESPN announcers, fine if he wants to up-grade his screen persona by playing a guy who actually appreciates the value of not acting like a jerk all the time, but in the process he might consider getting hold of writers who can come up with stuff that at least out-paces Porky's 2.