Does anyone else remember an episode of South Park from the 2004 season where Eric Cartman dresses up as a robot named AWESOM-O? The best part of the episode came when Cartman stumbled into a Hollywood meeting and they asked the robot to pitch a movie idea. He came up with idea after idea of Adam Sandler in some wacky yet predictable situation, each a slight variation from the last. The Hollywood execs ate it up and scribbled everything down, chanting, “Goldmine!” I imagine The Longest Yard remake, the latest Sandler comedy vehicle, came about through similar creatively bankrupt circumstances.

Paul Crewe (Sandler) is at a low point in his life. The once star quarterback has been banned from football for throwing a game. His girlfriend (Courtney Cox) thinks they should split, and after being chased by police for drunk driving, he?s been sent to prison. The warden (James Cromwell, your go-to guy if you need someone old) has big plans for Crewe. He wants the young stud to organize an all-inmate football team to play against the cruel guards. Crewe gets help from a fellow inmate Caretaker (Chris Rock) and they set about finding the right men for their team. A former Heisman-winning football player (Burt Reynolds), who happens to be in the same prison, becomes the coach. Slowly but surely the group becomes a team united to get some revenge on their tormentors.

The Longest Yard is an Adam Sandler comedy in the worst way possible. The film is sloppy and sophomoric but generally unfunny. It sets its comedy heights on kicking people in the nuts and making fun of gay people. Mission accomplished. The sex jokes, while in abundance, generally fall flat because the movie is so ineptly transparent when it comes to comedy. It lets all the air out of the supposed punch lines. The humor is typically homophobic but infuriatingly also anti-women. You see, one of the guards is taking steroids in a bottle with a giant label that says, “Steroids?”(so much for keeping a low profile). The boys replace the steroids with -hee hee- estrogen pills. And in three days time, which would of course have no effect in such a short period, the guard is now crying, and overly emotional, and empathetic, and he has hot flashes, though I don’t know how in the world a man comes to that conclusion. Apparently it’s funny because women are weak and care about each other. I would be offended by this whole joke if it wasn’t so incompetently done. The Longest Yard exists in its own inept world where inmates have cells within arms reach of each other and there’s a prison football league. Lest we forget, this prison also keeps a star system to rank its inmates. Little did you know of Roger Ebert’s unorthodox side projects.

Sandler plays Adam Sandler as he does in most of his Hollywood flicks. He’s likable, he’s a goofball, and it all works out. I wonder if we’ll ever see the true thespian side of Sandler again, like in Paul Thomas Anderson?s deconstructionist Punch-Drunk Love. Rock’s abrasiveness is toned down but he also loses his comedic edge. He’s basically another stereotypical black character in a movie making tired jokes about the difference between black people and white people. Cromwell and Reynolds both appear to be having fun mucking it up with the youngins. The rest of the supporting cast have their moments but aren’t very memorable. The movie fills out the athletes by having real football players and wrestlers.

What’s worse is that The Longest Yard wants to also be taken as a serious movie. This causes some intensely jarring scenes intended for dramatic impact but they just stick out sorely and are misplaced. Every time the movie goes from kicking people in the nuts to dealing with something like racism or death, the movie flounders from the tonal whiplash. The original movie was more of a prison drama than a sports movie, let alone a comedy. The Sandler remake wants to be all three and isn’t good at any of them.

This movie is so formulaic that it could have been written on a string of napkins, likely only totaling three. The Longest Yard feels like 2005’s greatest example of a cut-and-paste studio approved movie. Of course the embattled hero will once again face his demons and his past. Of course the motley crew of idiots and convicts will come together for something greater than themselves. Of course the evil guards will all get their comeuppance in appropriate ways. I expected all this from the start, but where The Longest Yard goes terribly wrong is when even the details can be correctly guessed. I watched the film with a couple friends and we accurately guessed every character move, scene transition, character development, and sadly, every punch line. This is a film that spells everything out, including the jokes. Here’s an example of the film’s shortsighted thought process: the dastardly warden soaks the player’s field and makes it all muddy with the intention of demoralizing the team. What? These are prisoners, and you think mud is going to demoralize them? Don’t even get me started on how insane it is sending Burt Reynolds into the game as a running back. There’s more attention spent on the limp football scenes than the story or the comedy.

Another example of how weak the comedy is comes during the football game. It’s being telecast on ESPN and Chris Berman is providing the play-by-play. His sidekick in the booth is an inmate who doesn’t say anything. Berman even broaches this fact on air. Now, if The Longest Yard knew the facets of comedy, the natural payoff for this sequence would be for the silent inmate to say something at the very end, something funny or unexpected or even verbose. Instead, the film has the inmate talk two or three times and he adds no comedy. That’s The Longest Yard in a nutshell: all set-up and no return. And seriously, stop with the Rob Schneider cameos already.

The humor is a cocktail of physical slapstick and the occasional one-liner. There just isn’t anything satisfying to the comedy The Longest Yard has to offer. The jokes typically don’t build to anything greater and the humor is simply immediate with no lasting results. There’s nothing that will make you keel over with laughter, nothing that rises above a smirk or a slight giggle. The jokes are way too predictable and there’s nothing funny about the expected. That’s why most people don’t chuckle when the mail arrives. This just isn’t an entertaining comedy, plain and simple.

The Longest Yard is a tirelessly formulaic affair that is so ham-fisted with comedy it can’t even deliver jokes properly. This is a dumb, sanitized, audience-friendly easily digestible piece of puff that will get caught in your throat. This is a Franken-movie, with various parts crammed together for the best possible results by some studio overlord. The Longest Yard‘s comedy is sophomoric and generally insipid, the drama is a complete misstep and tonally out of place, and the football scenes are vapidly jazzed up. This is a sports move that doesn’t work as a comedy and a comedy that doesn’t work as a sports movie. Sandler’s devout army of fans will likely be satiated with this latest effort, feeling the flick to be stupid fun. For me, it was just stupid. Very stupid.

Nate’s Grade: D