Football Movie Marathon #10 & #11: The Longest Yard (1974 & 2005)

Since last week required a brief sabbatical from the movies for me, I'm doubling shit up this week. Appropriately, I'm going to go with one of the better football movies and its not-so-great remake, both entitled The Longest Yard.

Bill Simmons was once working on a project someone like this one, reviewing the top 74 sports movies of the last 40 years or something of the sort. He wasn't going in any order, just sporadically picking whichever film he felt like talking about. He abandoned the project perhaps a tenth of the way through, only having wrote a review for one top 10 movie. Said movie was The Longest Yard, which placed third. High praise, considering he was writing about all sports movies. With Rocky, Raging Bull, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, Hoop Dreams, Hoosiers, Juwanna Man and more still out there, its hard to envision a movie that so few people these days have seen being so high. Well, it was. Number 3. The 2005 version, starring Adam Sandler in the role previously occupied by Burt Reynolds, was bashed in his column just as much as the 1974 movie was praised.

The story is pretty simple. Paul Crewe (Reynolds/Sandler) is a former MVP quarterback that has been exiled by pro football for throwing games. Early in the films his alcohol fueled behavior lands him in prison. The guards have a talented football team and the evil warden wants Crewe to put together a team of prisoners to give the guards a tune up for their season. When the team of inmates looks more promising than expected, Crewe is tempted to revert back to his game throwing ways to placate the warden and be rewarded accordingly. This creates a serious dilemma, as he has earned the trust and respect of his teammates.

1974's version of the story is a fairly slowly paced drama with some solid comedy sprinkled throughout. In the time the movie was made, Burt Reynolds was one of those actors that defined manliness...sort of America's answer to Sean Connery. This role suits him well. Also serving him well is that he was an accomplished football player in his day, before being held back by injuries. He is certainley one of the actor's in a sports movie that actually appears to know what the hell he is doing (a huge plus in my book...stuff like Wesley Snipes dribbling up to his armpits in White Men Can't Jump drives me crazy). I suppose that my biggest complaint is that there is about 85 minutes of a movie I really like in this thing, but there is about a half hour that needed to be left on the cutting room floor. Important scenes are frequent, but too often there are just spots that meander 5 minutes to long that don't advance the story or make me laugh much. The whole climatic football game is shot in the same manner that a game in the 70s would be. Simmons praises this trait, while I was just kind of bored by it. Ever watched a Super Bowl or anything from the 70s? You get impaitent. Now on a football telecast they'll jam in a replay of the down, a peek at the coach, a look at the quarterback, etc between every play. It's really just kind of...plain at times. Overall the movie is really solid because the story is so good and there isn't anyone that seems to be miscast. It is a ways out of first on my football movie list (and will only go down farther, I'm saving quite a few movies I like for later or next year), but I can recommend it for sure.

The 2005 version plays out as more of a straight comedy, and is the second best Adam Sandler football movie ever. They really jampacked this thing with cameos...Nelly, Michael Irvin, Goldberg, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Kevin Nash, and a bunch of ESPN personalities (yes, for some reason ESPN is broadcasting a scrimmage of a prison football game....better than Around the Horn I suppose). Burt Reynolds himself even is there for a small role. The laughs really seem to come from these smaller roles more than the main characters. Sandler, Chris Rock, Tracey Morgan, etc just aren't that funny throughout in my mind. The movie also tweaks the story at the ending a little bit, and in my opinion, the change is a lot worse. So yeah, this one isn't very good, but certainley not a diaster like Little Nicky or something like that. Perhaps I would think a lot worse of it if I held the first one up to "sacred sports movie" status. I mean, it isn't like Adam Sandler is trying to be Rocky Balboa here...

So personally, while I think they aren't even close in terms of quality, I dont really think either is among the best or worst sports movies (I suppose the 2005 version is one of the worst football movies I've seen though). The old version is "just" good, the new version is pretty flat with some fun cameos and cheap laughs.

Football Movie Marathon Rankings:
1) Any Given Sunday (1999)
2) Brian's Song (1971)
3) Knute Rockne: All American (1940)
4) Varsity Blues (1999)

5) The Longest Yard (1974)
6) Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL? (2009)
7) The Waterboy (1998)
8) The Band That Wouldn't Die (2009)

9) Invincible (2006)
10) The Longest Yard (2005)
11) Two For the Money (2005)