The Longest Yard: Critic Reviews

I can't help thinking that in this game of remake, points have been shaved.

Softer, louder and cleaner than the 1974 version, the new film sentimentalizes the prisoners and the game, filing down their sharpest edges so that winning becomes a matter of triumph rather than resistance.

Though there's no drearier trend in current movies than recycling, this modified Yard is more smoothly crafted than the 1974 slapstick version.

Whether it's the sight of Reynolds squeezed painfully into a football uniform or the endless footballs-to-the-crotch and tired gay jokes, The Longest Yard has the feeling of mutton dressed as lamb.

The pleasure is entirely like eating cake made from cake mix. It's not like you don't know how it's going to turn out, or how it tasted the last time you ate it.

It's surprising how much of the movie is flat and how predictable the gags are.

No uplifting populism here.

A misguided, miscast remake of the 1974 Robert Aldrich classic.

A serviceable bone-cruncher of a sports comedy, just tough enough and funny enough to reach the end zone.

Painfully unnecessary.

See it if you think Adam Sandler is Joe Montana. See it if you like men in team-issued tight pants. See it if you like men in prison-issue tight pants.

The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect.

Where the original was a serious film with funny moments, this movie isn't sure if it's a drama or comedy, too incompetently rendered to be both.

Provides a few laughs, contact endorphins for the pigskin-deprived, and not much else.

Viewers who come to see a football movie likely will leave satisfied. But those who want to see an Adam Sandler movie would do better to rent The Waterboy.

Good old-fashioned fun from kickoff to the last crossing of the goal line.

Instead of The Longest Yard, they should have called it the Shortest Route to the Bank.

Sandler smartly balances the script's mix of cynicism and sentiment in his ingratiating lead performance. (And he's physically persuasive as an ex-quarterback.)

The characters sound like they were dreamed up during the drive to the set.

It's not as good as the 1974 original, or even as good as the 2001 British soccer remake of Yard, Mean Machine. But there are bright spots.

The Longest Yard works well enough.

Unoriginal but confident, it's the kind of effort that's just good enough to keep [Sandler's] track record going.

People will go see The Longest Yard for all sorts of reasons -- its lively humor, the current of violence that's just under the surface, its message of underdog racial reconciliation, or the fact that there's no actual football to watch on TV.

What was already a raucous put-on, a goof on Aldrich's brutal action movies, is now a hyperbolic, gross-out cartoon, with a cast of enormous ex-football stars only adding to the air of facetiousness.

More Mirth Machine than Mean Machine, this agreeable remake still manages to go the distance.