The Longest Yard
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.
When Reynolds shows up for the mild, sporadically amusing rehash of ''The Longest Yard," as an inmate who wants to help Adam Sandler coach a football team of convicts, it's as sad as knowing that ''Monster-in-Law" was the best role Jane Fonda could find for her comeback. Reynolds gets to raise a few eyebrows and give half a speech or two, but he's just a diminished version of his former, vainglorious self.
But then everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.
Taking Reynolds's old part as Paul Crewe, Sandler is notably unexcitable, almost bored, which is understandable since he's been given nothing to play. Paul is a disgraced QB who's on probation for a point-shaving scandal six years prior. He's been living with his harridan of a girlfriend (a bosomy Courtney Cox) and one night steals her Bentley, drives it drunk, and crashes it in a pileup worthy of ''Cannonball Run." (That's the most touching homage to Rey-nolds in the whole picture.)
Paul is given three years at a Texas penitentiary whose guards are the size of linebackers and professional wrestlers, and happen to be played by them too. The slimy warden (James Cromwell) wants his new prisoner to guide a group of inmates to a game against the prison guards.
With the assistance of Caretaker (Chris Rock), Paul gathers a scrappy team that includes Nicholas Turturro, the rapper Nelly, former NFL wide receiver Michael Irvin, and the ex-football player and professional wrestler Bill Goldberg. They're a troupe of blacks, Italians, Hispanics, Jews, and gays (albeit the prison sort), and they square off against the steroidal rednecks who hurl slurs while guarding the pen. We're never told why these men are locked up, but it would probably take an entire season of ''Oz" to explain it all. In the filmmakers' thinking, it's probably easier if we're rooting against the racists as opposed to for the criminals.
Incidentally, the big game occupies the entire last third of the film (the longest yard, indeed) and employs the WWE-meets-NFL bone-crushing used in ''The Waterboy," Sandler's last football movie.
It's surprising how much of the movie is flat and how predictable the gags are. Actually, the director is Peter Segal, who made Sandler's ''Anger Management" and ''50 First Dates," so maybe ''surprise" is too strong a word. But in those films, Segal got Jack Nicholson and Drew Barrymore, respectively, to enjoy themselves. Here, not even Cloris Leachman, as the warden's sexed up secretary, or the usually infallible Terry Crews, as the dealer of contraband cheeseburgers, made me laugh. Rock feels particularly gratuitous, employing his race-first stylings to mixed effect. Of Nelly's barefoot running back, he observes, ''That boy got slave feet!" His sidekick role is a lot like Wanda Sykes's in ''Monster-in-Law": a racialized accessory whose jokes are on the fritz.
The remake lacks the original's thrill of social revolt. It's really only any good when it's being crudely subversive. The inmate Torres (Lobo Sebastian) is fixated on the Joy Behar portions of ''The View," a skinny Tracy Morgan heads the cellblock queens' cheerleading squad, and the massive wrestler Kevin Nash plays the guard whose steroids are secretly replaced with estrogen. Those bits are funny but they don't amount to a comic sensibility greater than ''let's see what sticks."
What the picture needs is a star not only willing to poke holes in all this but to have a blast doing it. In 1974, that was Burt Reynolds. But his successor isn't Sandler, it's Vince Vaughn, a wonderfully self-mocking actor whose immense cool and unflappable cockiness are played for laughs. If anybody has plans for a retread of ''Semi-Tough," I'd leave Sandler alone and call that man immediately.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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