Crewe is transferred to this dirt prison in Texas where the warden, Played by Academy Award® nominee James Cromwell (The Green Mile), is a football obsessed fanatic and state governor hopeful. He extorts Crewe into starting up a scrimmage team against the prison's team of guards, preparing them for the start of their upcoming semi pro league season. However, the inmates are determined to show the guards a little payback for years of abuse.

I had a problem with the believability of this picture, even though I suspended it quite often, just to get a couple laughs out of the film.

To name a couple of problems, I don't believe these inmates would develop the comradery they did while practicing over four weeks. That would be a very special prison and a useless prison if you think about it if all the inmates became friends.

Also, I liked how they set up the Warden and his political advisor making phone calls to get ESPN2 involved in broadcasting the scrimmage. It made ESPN2's involved not as contrived as it could have been. However, I have a tough time believing ESPN2 would be interested enough to cover a semi pro team of prison guards playing a bunch of degenerates simply because Paul Crewe is quarterbacking.

Those are my two main problems as far as believability goes. Another minor problem I have is the amount of fat guy jokes in the material. One or twice I can chuckle at fat guy jokes, but this picture was constant for one character, and after a while you simply feel sorry for the guy.

However, there are a couple really big laughs in this movie. The largest guard, played by pro wrestler Kevin Nash, taking estrogen pills and showing his feminine side was extremely funny. Also, being a wrestling fan, I also liked seeing Steve "Stone Cold" Austin and Bill "Who's Next" Goldberg in the picture, as well as a variety of former NFL notables.

Seeing Chris Berman of ESPN jump in for the big game commentary was a treat as well.

Overall, I think this latest version of "The Longest Yard" is worth seeing, and my problems with believability have to be put aside. There's no other way this story could be told without telling it the way the filmmakers did. I just didn't get into it as much as I maybe could have.

Benn - Where's the Humanity?

I have seen the original and I loved it so I wasn't expecting a whole lot from the remake. Besides a bunch of laugh's, the movie was not better than the original and I wonder why the decided to make it. Adam Sandler was good as Paul Crewe and Chris Rock was hilarious as Caretaker, but the rest of the actors were uninspiring in their roles as the con's which is a shame because in the original the con's were almost as funny as the stars.

The script basically followed the original and the casting which included former NFL players was also quite nice, even though I think Michael Irvin and Bill Romanowski are hoping for a movie career. However, the actors portraying the cons did not do anything to make their characters their own OR try to imitate the original characters. I won't mention any of them because they did do a good enough job to be mention, including Burt Reynolds.

The best part of the first movie and the worst part of the remake is the final play during the football game. Football movies are not as good as say baseball movies because it is hard to dramatize the sport. For examples of the high drama of baseball see the movie "The Natural." However, the ending to the original movie was as close to climatic as you can get without being cheesy. The remake had an almost anti-climatic final play. That just was either poor writing or directing.

I would either wait for the $1 movies on this film or forget it all together and watch the original. The only other reason to see the remake is that Courtney Cox, who is in it for the first 10 minutes, shows off her cleavage for the entire time and that is not a bad thing. I had no idea she has a freckled chest either and that was kind of a turn on.