ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: THE ADAM SANDLER REHABILITATION PROJECT
Spoilers Ahead for The Longest Yard (i guess…) (2005)
John Wright: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Zone Film Challenge. We’re trying something different for the next few weeks, we’re just doing one film. You might have some questions about that but you’ll need to put them on hold because I have a question for my partner in crime — Alex — what is the Adam Sandler Rehabilitation Project?
Alex McDonough: So, the Adam Sandler Rehabilitation Project is my populist handshake where I think that Adam Sandler has gotten a raw deal in the film critic/film nerd circle. His films are usually derided, exceptions being Punch Drunk Love, Uncut Gems or Meyerowitz Stories. I think his actual Happy Madison Productions films may have a little more value to them than people let on— not all of them, some of them. The first movie that made me think this was Hubie Halloween which I am a staunch defender of. This week though, we are looking at the 2005 film, a remake of a 1974 sports drama — The Longest Yard.
John: That’s right. Somewhat similar to my crusade with Michael Bay’s canon, we’re taking a look at the Sandman and not just Uncut Gems or Punch Drunk Love where it’s okay to like him. We’re going to look at one of the premier people in our entertainment industry where you demonstrate your own good taste by deriding them. I picked this movie and you didn’t protest too much, mostly because it was on Netflix.
Alex: It was accessible.
John: Very accessible. This is one of those movies where I remember it being around, it was one of those movies — and there’s a very real chance that this will make no sense at all — it’s one of those movies where if you went over to a friend’s house from like 2007 to 2012, their older brother would be watching this, Step Brothers or Tropic Thunder on TNT. They used these sorts of mass appeal comedies to lead into NBA games a lot on TNT in particular.
Alex: Yeah, I remember it hung on at shelves at the Target or Wal-Mart checkout line.
John: Very much a Wal-Mart bargain bin movie.
Alex: It appeared a lot in the stacks. Honestly, The Longest Yard, of those 2000s Sandler comedies, this one is sandwiched between the well-liked 50 First Dates and Click. It has a lower reputation than those ones but compared some of his later output — Grown Ups, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan or earlier stuff like Little Nicky — it seems like the perfect middle ground. As we go through we’ll learn that maybe that’s not warranted. I don’t know how you felt about it but I…I was not a fan. This is not an auspicious start to the Adam Sandler Rehabilitation Project.
John: Yeah, I was — okay, so this is a comedy -
Alex: Allegedly.
John: This is a comedy, the basic pursuit is to make you laugh, there are points where I was amused. This is an ensemble comedy and it’s one of those ensembles assembled to make sure no one has to act too much. Everyone is assigned one running joke and your running joke’s quality is directly proportional to your quality in this movie. So there’s a lot of people who would later go onto have a lot of success — whether in comedy or otherwise — who are just not very funny here at all. Terry Crews is a huge victim of this, Tracy Morgan definitely is.
Alex: Yeah, Terry Crews whole bit is that he always has McDonalds cheeseburgers -
John: Yeah Crews just does fast food puns. Chris Rock is not funny in this either.
Alex: Tracy Morgan’s character is fucking horrible. I hate his character. It’s this evil trans-panic character. I hate it.
John: It is vile and transphobic but it is like — it’s a prison rape joke. It’s the same prison rape joke that got made in everything from this period of time.
Alex: Right, my argument is that the 2000s were a worse time for trans people than maybe any other decade because they were just visible enough to be hated. And that’s what this film is doing. Then there’s Switowski [Bob Sapp] who is this Lenny-like gentle giant who talks in minstrel-cadence. That really bugged me too. There is a lot in this film that really got under my skin BUT without drawing too much on that my main concern here was Adam Sandler. And I like the way the character starts out — and his performance I think is subdued in a way that his characters were not before — now this is coming off of 50 First Dates where he also plays it mellow but here he’s practically barred-out. It’s an interesting take but it makes for a really dull main character and for a comedy, he’s despondent.
John: They need a tripartite main character basically because Paul Crewe [Adam Sandler] is the main character for the plot, Coach Nate [Burt Reynolds] is the main character in terms of actually making you want to root for him, and Caretaker [Chris Rock] is the main character in terms of doing bits. Sandler leaves most of the best banter for himself but he’s got some real groaners too. Right at the beginning when he gets pulled over by the cops for DUI, he’s doing sub-Cary Grant “oh you pick up FM radio on those ears?” banter. I thought this was supposed to be raunchy but he’s doing short guy jokes and stuff.
Alex: The one thing people always mention is that there’s no way that Adam Sandler was ever in the NFL, let alone a quarterback — he’s Adam Sandler. That said, Sandler is so swaggy, he’s so cool and sure of himself in addition to being a depressed bad boy. It doesn’t coalesce at all but instead of being surreal and funny, it’s flat. He feels miscast and considering that Happy Madison bankrolled the film — presumably as a star vehicle — it’s a strange failing of the film.
John: Yeah, it stands out more since they went out of their way to get a lot more musclemen and ex-football players. It’s one thing when it’s The Waterboy and the joke is that he is way too small to be a football player.
Alex: Right! The Longest Yard never makes that connection though.
John: He’s just a little football guy.
Alex: In the ’74 film, Burt Reynolds plays his character and in 1974, Reynolds would have made more sense in the NFL but here Sandler is up against Crews, who played football, Brian Bosworth, Bob Sapp, and a couple others.
John: Not to mention Burt Reynolds himself who played football at Florida State University.
Alex: Yeah, they’re four to five times Sandler’s size.
John: Burt Reynolds was able to get cast as a football player because he was a big time college football player.
Alex: If Sandler had been a football player in like 1979 or something, that would have been acceptable but after the Fridge took the field, there’s no way Sandler is stepping foot on a football field.
John: Maybe Doug Flutie but I bet you anything that Sandler is shorter than Flutie. (POST SCRIPTUM: Doug Flutie and Adam Sandler are both 5'10")
“This is not an auspicious start to the Adam Sandler Rehabilitation Project.”
Alex: All said, I can suspend my disbelief on that.
John: Yeah, I don’t care. It’s for the jokes.
Alex: It’s a funny riff but you’d think they’d do more with it. You’d think they’d be more aware of it but the film is doing this thing where it’s trying to be serious and funny and it never finds that common ground. The original film was a drama with comedic elements but this one tries to be primarily a comedy with some drama — it’s a bad melt.
John: It’s very fitting that there are a ton of pro wrestlers here because it reminds me of that mean spirited late 90s to early 2000s WWF/WCW comedy where it’s always a dick joke, a gay joke, a stupid joke, a racial joke, or a women joke.
Alex: I wish there were more dick jokes in this movie.
John: They gave the only one to Goldberg. He has a gigantic dick. That’s the joke. This feels like it should be rated R, and it’s not.
Alex: Yeah, it’s odd that it’s not.
John: I remembered it as being Rated R. It’s likely PG-13 so it could cast a wider net.
Alex: Yeah, exactly. It’s a Sandler comedy you go see with your son.
John: “Don’t tell mom and don’t say any of those words”
Alex: Now, there’s the bit where Caretaker gets blown up after telling his new Crewe that he wants Crewe to visit his mom when he gets out of prison. The death is supposed to be a sad moment but at the funeral, they’re throwing down cheeseburgers and copies of NFL Street and condoms and shit which would be a funny joke but it’s given no time to sit. This movie’s comedy goes off at the wrong time, it’s timed all wrong.
There was a very funny joke toward the end where Sitowski knocks a dude out, makes him shit himself and the announcers, coaches, keep saying “Oh I think he made him shit himself” and then finally the medic picks him up and says like “Oh, that guy made him shit himself….real bad!” The repetition wears you down. That’s really the only time the movie hammers in a comedic rule of 3s or 5s. Everything else is just like, throw that joke out there and see if it lands.
John: Wearing you down is kind of the approach here it seems to me. There’s always jokes which I admire on some level — they aren’t always good jokes but there are always jokes. I’d rather watch this than Jack and Jill.
Alex: Well, Jack and Jill has Dunkacchino. -
John: At the end! You have to sit through all of Jack and Jill to get to Dunkacchino. I saw that movie in theaters, I know this.
Alex: But Dunkacchino has more cultural import and has a funnier concept and execution than anything in this movie short of -
John: The soundtrack! The soundtrack is pretty much the only thing that stuck around as a piece of football culture. You brought up NFL Street a bit ago — this was all part of this early-aughts merchandising push to blend football with the wider effort to sell junk with a hip-hop coat of paint to suburban white boys.
Alex: We talked earlier about how this movie’s soundtrack album is composed of a lot of songs that weren’t actually on the soundtrack. The movie’s actual soundtracking is mostly 60s and 70s rock — Spirit in the Sky or Creedence — but the soundtrack is hip-hop, there isn’t a single CCR song to be found. Instead they have the Nelly song that was composed that was written for this movie. It does feel like it was made for Madden NFL or Blitz: The League.
John: It’s very much in that genre — if you told me that this was the Madden 05 soundtrack or the NBA Live 06 soundtrack, I’d have believed you. it’s that weird — a very weird way that people encounter music nowadays but that might be something for another column.
“Everyone was assigned one running joke and none of them are good.”
Alex: Sure, I thought this hit most of the marks that I expected it to soundtrack-wise. I happy that I got to use my Spirit in the Sky tag on Letterboxd because I hadn’t tagged that in a while. Did it strike you as weird that this film didn’t have much slapstick? Because that struck me as off.
John: A little bit.
Alex: It’s here and there. When they first take the field the prisoners absolutely wallop the prison guards but for a film about big guys crashing into each other, there’s not a lot of that even though Sandler films are slapstick heavy.
John: Here’s the thing, they got a lot of wrestlers for this but several of them are more or less are completely immobile and cannot bump at all. That would be Kevin Nash and the Great Khali . Although it seems like more or less all of them said “Fuck you, I’m not doing anything.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Goldberg said that, Bob Sapp definitely said that. The NFL guys seemed more willing to do physical stuff, Michael Irwin especially, who is still shredded in 2005. I wonder how much they paid for stunts and stuff if the wrestlers didn’t do their own?
Alex: Well, the film’s budget was $91 million.
John: Okay, but how much of that went toward getting the NFL and NCAA licenses because those couldn’t have been cheap.
Alex: I do bemoan the loss of these ambitious big comedies because even the less good ones like Goldmember, I’m still impressed by the scope of joke in most of them. The dance routine at the beginning of Goldmember or there’s a really elaborate parachuting scene in Hangover III — both films that are not good to be clear — but this film doesn’t have anything that is that large scale so you start to wonder where the fuck did the budget go — and honestly the licenses for the NFL and the soundtrack — that’s almost certainly where it went.
John: The NFL certainly does not go in for this sort of brand association anymore.
Alex: Yeah it seems to have fizzled out.
John: In a post-concussion, a post Michael Vick world, it doesn’t make sense to draw more attention to your game being violent with bad people excelling at it.
Alex: This movie does seem like the last gasp of that and it shows the cultural dead end of it.
John: It feels focus grouped — it has the classic rock soundtracking and Burt Reynolds to draw in your dad — but also there’s wrestling, Nelly, and Sandler for you and your siblings and friends.
Alex: It’s also this remake of a film that was big in the 70s and it’s weird that it’s Happy Madison behind it. Happy Madison productions are usually original IPs with a basic concept with a budget that was decently high and the jokes were raunchy and baudy. But here, they aren’t. Like we mentioned earlier, every character has one quirk that they repeat over and over again.
John: Everyone was assigned one running joke and none of them are good.
Alex: There’s no elaborate gag work, there’s no elaborate physical stunts. The plot is as bare bones as the others but it doesn’t even shift location often. Other Sandler films feel like he’s shooting on vacation which is something I kind of like about his movies. Here you’re just at the prison the entire time except when you’re in San Diego or at the football game at the end. Otherwise it’s a really closed in movie and it doesn’t feel like it has any room to stretch. Sandler’s performance reflects that because it is so subdued and too cool for school which is not a character he plays often, if at all.
John: Part of that is the size of the ensemble and that probably also explains why the budget was what it was. Sandler’s character is the way he is because everyone’s gotta get their shine and establish what their deal is. They have like six minutes of screentime to work with on average.
Alex: Yeah, it’s far too much film. It assembles two full football teams worth of characters and a lot of them are these big names; Sandler, Rock, Reynolds, James Cromwell — the movie is overstuffed and too busy.
John: We were talking — we had technical difficulties earlier — and you were attempting to give a plot summary and I had to jump in because there is -
Alex: I stepped over the first part of the plot, yeah -
John: You described something that made exponentially more sense than the actual reason there is a football game. It’s this convoluted stuff with the warden wants to run for state office and he’s going to bring in ESPN for the guards vs. prisoners football game and he wants Sandler to throw the game for him. They couldn’t come up with a good plot so they just came up with a lot of plot.
Alex: I mean, they must have reheated a lot of it from the original but then added these modern flourishes like ESPN on there. It’s a mess, it totally goes out of bounds. Not a single part of this film works, its soundtrack aside, the weird little cultural crossover right at the only part it could have been captured; WWE, football and Adam Sandler blue collar comedy — it caught that moment right at its peak point of convergence. The only thing this movie needed to really seal the deal was Larry the Cable Guy cameo and we didn’t get that, but we do get Rob Schneider. I guess you take what you can get.
John: Yeah, here’s the thing — I agree with everything you just said but I will say I understand why this movie is remembered as one of the better Sandler comedies because it is generally pleasant to put on. It’s not funny but it feels like you should be enjoying it as it washes over you.
Alex: Yeah, the general impression I’ve gotten from people who watched this film growing up is exactly that. Is that it is generally pleasant, this is my first time watching it. I may have seen snippets here and there but I found the Morgan and Sapp stuff unbearable. It reminded me of — also in 2005 — the Johnny Knoxville film The Ringer. Have you seen that?
John: I have not.
Alex: Do you know what it’s about?
John: I do not.
Alex: It’s about a guy who pretends to have mental disabilities so he can hang out with their hot teacher and help them win the Special Olympics.
John: Oh my god, it’s the South Park bit.
Alex: It’s a really rough movie, I think that 2005 was when these movies — these evil comedies — maybe that’s biased — but I think that’s when these movies had their real big moment. There’s another movie called Just Friends that’s similarly cruel and I’m sure whatever American Pie Straight to DVD movie that came out that year is just most misogynistic malicious thing put to DVD. It’s also the year that Family Guy got revived so you know, maybe a dark time.
“This is an ensemble comedy and it’s one of those ensembles assembled to make sure no one has to act too much.”
John: I think we may have inadvertently hit on something there. A lot of the lasting positive feelings can be summarized as it so well embodied the culture that spawned it. The culture that spawned it is repugnant but people are like yeah I remember those times. Times don’t have to be good for you to have nostalgia for them.
Alex: Yeah, I think that the general reception to this film by those who still like it is mostly predicated on nostalgia. That’s fine, I think most people would say “yeah i watched it as a kid and I remember it fondly enough” and I like Dodgeball and Dodgeball -
John: Dodgeball’s a lot better than this.
Alex: It’s got some really over the line jokes but Dodgeball is a film with better pacing, is more outrageous in its structure and Longest yard is too serious, the jokes it has aren’t funny or outrageous in the way its contemporaries are. We can head for the barn on this one, how do you feel?
John: Yeah, I feel the same. Oh, one thing I wanted to say — Bill Fichtner plays the guard team’s QB, I don’t believe you ever played football Bill, even more so than Sandler.
Alex: Nah, Fichtner does not seem like he’s ever stepped anywhere near a football field. Maybe he played baseball in high school but he seems like a Julliard man through and through.
John: I could see him running cross country.
Alex: That doesn’t count. I said a field.
John: Where do you think you run cross country?
Alex: A trail.
*laughs*
John: That’s just a field with guidelines.
Alex: It’s different. There’s no ball in cross country.
John: Do you recommend this film?
Alex: I do not. And I do not rehabilitate it either.
John: I do not either. I didn’t hate it as much as you did but it’s not good.
Alex: The Adam Sandler Rehabilitation Project was my idea and I’m out here with this first movie and I’m like “NO. Bin It.”
John: It has exploded on the launch pad. It’s my fault because I picked the movie. We should have done Hubie Halloween.
Alex: 15 Words or Less;
John: I was wondering how they’d pad out the movie, then they killed Chris Rock.
Alex: They Don’t make em like they used to and this is why.
Wanna take the challenge? Next week’s prompt is: Aborted Sci-Fi Epics; Pick a film that was meant to begin a sci-fi saga…that never materialized.
