Overview :The story of pro quarterback Paul Crewe (Sandler) and former college champion and coach Nate Scarboro (Reynolds), who are doing time in the same prison. Asked to put together a team of inmates to take on the guards, Crewe enlists the help of Scarboro to coach the inmates to victory in a football game ''fixed'' to turn out quite another way.
Critic Reviews
Grade
When Burt Reynolds appeared in ''The Longest Yard'' 31 years ago, he was at the height of his magnetism as a virile Hollywood star. Playing an ex-quarterback locked up for stealing a car, he was self-mocking and unwilling to take anything about the picture too seriously, including himself. Directed by Robert Aldrich, at the ebb of his powers, the movie was junk, everybody involved seemed to know it, and that awareness produced a loosey-goosey lark. more...
B+
Three weeks ago I saw ''The Longest Yard,'' and before I left for the Cannes Film Festival, I did an advance taping of an episode of ''Ebert & Roeper'' on which I gave a muted thumbs-up to Richard Roeper's scornful thumbs-down. I kinda liked it, in its goofy way. There was a dogged ridiculousness to the film that amused me, especially in the way Adam Sandler was cast as a star quarterback. Once you accept Sandler as a quarterback, you've opened up the backfield to the entire membership of the Screen Actors' Guild. more...
3 star(5)
Adam Sandler doesn't look like a guy who could shave points off a football game, at least not without bursting into tears of remorse and apologizing in a high-pitched burble. Burt Reynolds does — and did with even more anarchic macho swagger some 30 years ago when he originated the role of disgraced former NFL quarterback Paul ''Wrecking'' Crewe currently reprised by Sandler in The Longest Yard. And therein lies a cultural shift that culminates in the reasonably diverting but curiously defanged remake of the jailhouse-gridiron underdog saga we have now before us: In studio comedies and urban entertainments — even those that claim to rebel against the system, stick it to the power, and detonate the bombs of racial bigotry — we are living in the age of the PG-13 Sandler Man, intrinsically nice team player, rather than the R-rated Reynolds Man, potentially dangerous lone fox. And in such a setting of boys-at-play, it's harder to tell the subversive from the product-placement deal. more...
C+
In ''The Longest Yard,'' the crummy remake of the 1974 film of the same title, Adam Sandler stars as the former N.F.L. quarterback Paul Crewe, who years earlier was booted out of the league for shaving points. In the original film, directed with seriocomic facility by the great Robert Aldrich, Crewe was played by Burt Reynolds with effortless charm, tufts of visible chest hair and the tightest pants this side of Tony Orlando. Finding a perfect groove as the fallen hero, Mr. Reynolds didn't attempt to ingratiate himself with the audience or make nice; he knew that we would fall for him anyway. more...
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Critic Reviews