Do not pay to see this movie

Rating: 1/10 (14 September 2005)

Don't waste your money or your time on this movie. Get the original. The only thing this version improved on was the soundtrack. Even that was not a large improvement.
Let's start with the obvious. Can anyone really picture Adam Sandler as a football player without flashing back to "The Waterboy?" Aside from that, he is too scrawny to even pretend to be an NFL MVP. Very poor casting. And Chris Rock. How many times do we have to hear his "white boy this and white boy that" schtick? Man, is it old. It stopped being funny years ago. Burt Reynolds. How much of a movie slut do you have to be to take a supporting role (played superbly by Michael Conrad in the original) in a remake of one of your best movies? I am sure that anyone under the age of 16 would love this movie. It has loud music, lots of gay jokes and bone-crunching football sequences. But the sequences are cheesy. Picture Nelly making the same stupid spin moves to break or avoid tackles and you have the bulk of the action.
What really bothered me about this movie is that the director expected his audience to be stupid and had to over-explain everything. Here is a perfect example: At the end of the original, Crewe appears to be escaping and Warden Hazen tells CPT Knauer (Ed Lauter) to shoot him. You can see that Crewe won over Knauer, who can't bring himself to pull the trigger. When he realizes that Krewe is picking up the football, he slaps the rifle in Eddie Albert's chest and says, "Game ball." That's it. We knew what he meant and that he would be a stand-up guy. Fast forward 30 years and Peter Segal has his CPT Knauer tell Hazen, "IT'S the game ball." The Knauer has a heart-to-heart with Crewe to tell him that Knauer will not let Hazen falsely accuse Crewe of a crime. Thanks for the touchy-feely moment to close the movie, Segal. It was more saccharine than I could bear.
Maybe someone can explain this one to me. When the police stop Crewe in his girlfriend's car, he gives them the beer he has been drinking. Just for fun, he also gives them the other five beers from the six-pack. When the car is wrecked, he gets out and salutes the TV chopper with, yes, another beer. Did he stop during the chase for another six-pack or did Segal figure that we would forget what happened one whole scene ago? Okay, I'm grousing. I did not expect this remake to be as good as the original. I also did not expect it to be such a cheesy hack of a movie.