Enough with the football, Adam!

Rating: 6/10 (11 July 2005)

"The Longest Yard" (2005) Dir. Peter Segal Gosh, Adam Sandler really does need to call it a day with these mediocre football films. "The Waterboy" was retarded and lame, bringing Sandler down from a once actually-quite-good-comedic-reputation. "Yard" is better than "Waterboy" but it is still nothing more than just another football movie from Sandler with a lame moral.
It actually doesn't start out too bad. Courteney Cox-Arquette plays the bitch from hell with great breasts so well you're not left wanting her to wither and die in the closet she's locked in but to come out of there and join the football team herself. The situation which leads to Sandler being thrown in the joint is fairly humorous and well-filmed.
Once he gets there, the film remains entertaining and puts Sandler's character in a tight spot, he is left to recruit an entire football team by orders from the nasty warden played by James Cromwell (perhaps spoofing his own role in "The Green Mile"?) to play the guards, despite William Fichtner's vicious guard leader seriously disapproving of the competition.
Sandler goes off about recruiting members of the football team to play, and in a jail full of huge, scary convicts, it isn't too hard to get together a team to bring Fichtner's guards to weak knees. I particularly enjoyed the basketball sequence, very cool, and the character of the enormous black guy who could lift an entire bench of his inmates up like they were flies, while all the time underneath being a bit of a big softie.
The film is successful in that it works up a number of likable, funny characters, even though most of them are stereotypes. The draggy/cross-dressing stereotype is played on in a funny way when they become the official cheerleaders. The black guys, big guys who look scary but are nice underneath, all of that is here. All of these are obviously unoriginal and undeveloped characters but they remain fun to watch nonetheless.
Less enjoyable to watch are the prison guards, though we see very little of them. When it comes time for us to finally feel sympathy for them and kinda like them a little bit, it's too late in the game (no pun) as we haven't had enough time prior to this development to give it any build-up. The battle between the prison guards and the inmates is also irritatingly far-fetched at times, it's doubtful that the guys doing time would be given enough freedom to gain access to the guards' locker rooms, or that they would be left alone in the projector room! But where the movie really falls from grace is the last half an hour or so, which feels like the entire two hours all in one go. The final game against the guards and inmates (held in a stadium to cheering fans, dear God) just drags on for too long, personally I lost momentum and interest after five minutes.
Chris Rock is also wasted here, the resolution to his character is such a bad move for the film, showing that he was in "Yard" to be nothing more than Chris Rock himself and make funny lines in the background. He had no relevance to the plot at all.
Sandler himself is stomachable enough, I always like him better when he's not doing his crazy over-the-top antics ALA "Little Nicky" and is just playing the regular guy facing off against incredible odds. The film's cast is actually quite impressive, with Burt Reynolds playing a supporting part with enough Reynoldsy charm to render him watchable, and Nelly being one of the film's highlights (!). Nelly even holds his own in a sort-of dramatic scene in which the guards continuously drop books while Nelly's character is doing library duty. He was very likable in the film and one of my favourite parts of it.
Though the film has energy to spare until the last frame, Sandler doesn't know when to call it quits with the damn final football game, and he has to realise that watching guys to tackled OVER and OVER again (a Nelly song, in fact) may not be as enjoyable for an impatient audience as it is for him.
6/10