The Longest Yard (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) |
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The Longest Yard is a remake of a 1974 film about a pro quarterback of questionable character who lands himself in a maximum security prison. Once there, he is enlisted by the warden to help out with his semi-pro football team, which consists of vicious Nazi guards. (The Boz plays one of them, although I don't know which one, because they all look like The Boz). Eventually the warden decides that the guards should play the prisoners in a tune-up game. Yup, the same prisoners they abuse every day. Why anyone would think this is a good idea is beyond me, but that's the plot we have to accept. The QB assembles a team of convicts and is about to lead them to victory when the warden tells him he better throw the game or face doing hard time for life. Since the QB once threw a pro game, the warden is confident of his co-operation ... Should he be? I think you can probably figure that out The most interesting questions raised by The Longest Yard center around the nature of a remake. A film remake is generally not the same as the revival of a play. If we mosey on down to Lincoln Center to see a revival of South Pacific, we are going to see something very, very close to what audiences saw in the 1950's, except with the benefit of modern technology and stagecraft. A stage revival is basically the same thing as a road company production of the original play, in that it consists of different actors saying the same lines as in the original. The only real difference between a revival and a road company is that there is a longer period of time separating the revival from the original. On the other hand, if we go to see a remake of a movie, we are not likely to see a word-for-word clone, unless those words come from something sacred and untouchable like Hamlet. Remakes are generally different interpretations of the same source material, updated with modern filming technology, ala The Thomas Crown Affair. The Longest Yard is a bit of an exception. It is practically a revival of the original. The only significant changes come from the fact that the original 1970s movie took place in the 70s, and the 2005 version takes place in 2005. That required some changes: there's some new music, ESPN is there, Caretaker becomes a black guy. All of that was mostly just necessary tinkering. Essentially, this is the same movie, except that the update has sanded off some of the rough edges and diluted some of the bitterness which made the first one good enough to be a film considered worthy of remaking in the first place. I don't see the point of spending $82 million dollars to do a revival of a modest movie, but I guess the bottom line is that the first one was a decent little entertainment movie which made money, and the same can be said of the watered-down revival. By the way, The Longest Yard has been remade once before, as 2001's Mean Machine, which placed the story in the U.K., and re-jigged it for European football instead of the American variety. None of the three movies are great, simply because they never made any attempt to be. The IMDb scores for all three movies are appropriately solid, if unspectacular.
If you go to a remake of a Burt Reynolds movie knowing that Adam Sandler is playing a pro quarterback, I would assume that your expectations are modest, and in that case, they will probably be fulfilled within reason, although I think the film might have benefited from a lot more humor. I guess my only additional point is that if you've seen one of these three films, you've seen 'em all. There's no problem with that, as long as you know it in advance, and are all right with it. Obviously a lot of people were quite all right with it. Critics didn't care for it, but this film is scored a B+ by Yahoo's "Joe average" crowd. That is the same score achieved by Sin City, Cinderella Man, and Crash, and it is based on a very large statistical base (36000 votes, as I write this). In other words, to quote Dick Tuck, "the people have spoke - the bastards!" They spoke with their wallets as well. The Longest Yard was a solid hit at the box office. Using the Box Office Mojo ticket price data to adjust for inflation, the revival achieved almost exactly the same level of box office performance as the original, which did $43 million in 1974, equivalent to approximately 23 million tickets. The revival did $158 million, also equivalent to 23 million tickets! One thing worries me about that. I hope the success of The Longest Yard revival doesn't start a trend for reviving old Burt Reynolds movies with juvenile comics playing Burt's old roles. What would be next? Rob Schneider in Cannonball Run 2? Johnny Knoxville in Smokey and the Bandit? I know - how about remaking At Long Last Love with David Spade? OK, maybe two of those ideas are ridiculous, but I'll bet that some Hollywood suits have already discussed placing Knoxville in a Smokey and the Bandit remake! One last point about the Longest Yard remake. It is obvious from the reaction of the British critics that a lack of enthusiasm for American football turns this so-so moviegoing experience into an extremely bad one. It is interesting to note that although football is now America's favorite game, it has never really produced a great movie on the level of the best baseball, boxing, or basketball movies. The original version of The Longest Yard makes the football top ten, and even the remake sneaks into the top twenty. Here are the top fifteen football films based on IMDb's ratings:
The highest ranking belongs to Remember the Titans, which is a terrific movie, but not among the greatest ever made, far from the 7.8 required to break into the IMDb Top 250. Since I've seen every one on the list, and many more, I'll offer my own rankings by sub-caegory, as follows:
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