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80Sandler impressively assumes the Reynolds role here, with strong support by Reynolds himself and a slightly restrained but frequently hilarious Chris Rock.
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75What links the two films in fun and ferocity is the big game, a ripsnorter that is irresistibly entertaining.
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75The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it's a fair example of what it is.
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75The new version has the zip of a 96-yard punt return and all the ingredients to inspire the celebratory crushing of empty beer cans.
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75Its crass good humor makes it an enjoyable, reasonably faithful but over-the-top successor to the original.
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70This agreeable remake still manages to go the distance.
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67It's a definite crowd-pleaser and a perfectly fun night at the movies.
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67Sandler's frequent director, Peter Segal, also rises to the occasion, giving the proceedings some of the rough-hewn, hard-edged look of the original, and brings it to a funny, satisfying climax that -- happily -- doesn't cop out.
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63Whether you'll enjoy this loud and rowdy remake of a 1974 Burt Reynolds film depends on your tolerance for three things: football, Adam Sandler and unabashed product placement.
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63Though Sandler's resemblance to a pro athlete is indiscernible, his mockery of authority and his penchant for buffoonery and slapstick violence make him more of an heir to Reynolds than might be expected.
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60That's what is missing from The Longest Yard most egregiously. Charm has been kept on the bench.
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60The 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.
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60The new jokes all seem like discards from a Rob Schneider comedy, but for the most part director Peter Segal (Anger Management) and screenwriter Sheldon Turner play a good defensive game, sticking close to the original film's story.
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58Each joke and one-liner is a made-for-HBO zinger, each scene with Sandler a reaffirmation of the old friendship between the two successful SNL alums.
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50It's a misguided, miscast remake of the 1974 Robert Aldrich classic.
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50What makes the new movie almost bearable is the byplay between Sandler and Chris Rock.
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50No classic, but neither was the original starring Burt Reynolds. Instead, it's an odd mix of amusing nonsense and nastiness that chugs along, hit and miss, until the last section, which is the best part of the movie and its real reason for being: the game.
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50Everyone 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.
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50The lack of condescension is the movie's saving grace, if grace is the right word. There's no snobbery to the low-blow humor, or to Reynolds' low-key, genial comeback turn, or to Sandler's more-ingratiating-than-athletic lead performance.
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50Consistently entertaining, athletically brutal, and, more often than not, well-acted.
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50Setting such larger aesthetic questions aside, there isn't much to dislike about The Longest Yard, at least once you've gotten used to the pervasive fear of homosexuality that seems to ooze from the film's pores.
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50Peter Segal's film, a predictable, choppy affair at best, boasts an understated, likable performance by Sandler, but here we never feel, as we did with the original, invested in the outcome of the final game, or convinced of the redeemability of the movie's sordid protagonist.
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50The 2005 version refashions the material into a dual vehicle for Chris Rock and Adam Sandler, "Saturday Night Live" alums who specialize in lazy, ramshackle comedies that are just okay enough to not completely suck.
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Future analysts of American culture...will no doubt ponder why an incarceration-crazy society ends up rooting for the objects of its own control anxiety as comedic underdogs.
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50It strains to be funny where the original's gags were efficiently deadpan, yet it's also so unbearably lazy, stooping to cliché and caricature when it backs itself into the shower.
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50If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.
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40Sandler's performance is aimed squarely at the fans who love his smarty-pants man-boy shtick and Rock gets off some funny lines, but overall this is one dreary, formulaic slog through sports-movie cliches.
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40The Longest Yard lives or dies with its physical humor, a form of recent comedy I like to call slapstick sadism.
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40It's less a film than a series of skits exhumed from the Reynolds original.
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"The Waterboy" was funny because Sandler doesn't look like a football player. When he swaggers around The Longest Yard starting fights and taking beatings without flinching, he only reminds us how little Steve McQueen and how much Woody Allen there is in him.
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30Softer, 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.
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30Whether 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.
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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. What it accomplishes instead is to be nothing at all. An excessive, stupid, empty-headed nothing.
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25The result is a quickly paced, slickly filmed entertainment that's also as crude and rude as the PG-13 rating will allow. It's mighty mean-spirited too, aiming "satirical jibes" at everyone from black illiterates to white rednecks, from breakers of the law to enforcers of the law, from society's elites to society's dregs.
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20What 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 (plus the 7-foot-2-inch Indian wrestler Dalip Singh) only adding to the air of facetiousness.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 29 out of 51
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Mixed: 7 out of 51
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Negative: 15 out of 51
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