The longest yard

Herald rating: * *

Someday soon, some post-modernist revisionist reconstructionalist liberal arts PhD student will get a huge research grant to write a thesis pinpointing the moment when Hollywood realised it could dispense with writers, re-writers, think tanks and, rather than coming up with new ideas for movies, simply remake all the old ones.

It's the ultimate triumph of the marketing and accountancy departments. "Listen, Lou, the kids who're gonna go to an Adam Sandler movie on a Saturday night at the mall ain't never heard of Burt Reynolds.

"Or maybe only in, like, a kiddie movie with a chimpanzee. So we can remake this old Burt Reynolds movie with Adam Sandler and we don't gotta pay for the script or any of those downstream costs ... hey, and here's the twist: we get Burt Reynolds for a bit part." Sorry, time to stop being a grumpy old man.

The Longest Yard is a remake of Reynolds' 1974 prison flick, with Sandler as an alcoholic former football star who gets drunk, gets DIC-ed, is convicted, goes to jail and gets conned by the warden (James Cromwell) into playing in a prisoners v guards match.

Because of Sandler's past fame and because there might be ratings in it, coverage of the game is sold to a sports channel. Sandler ropes in a former prisoner who knows a bit about football to coach the team.

This is Reynolds' lucky break. The twist is, Sandler's character has to decide whether to throw the game and have his sentence reduced or win the match and retain the respect of his fellow prisoners.

He will have meaningful dialogues about this with his best buddy, who - surprise - just happens to be the Afro-American superstar, Chris Rock.

There was a subtext to the original that the remakers missed: it was seen, in critical circles, as a commentary on the Nixon regime, mired in Watergate, the wagons of the Vietnam experience circling, the nasty authoritanarism of the administration expressed in the prison governors.

As the DVD comes out, in the wake of Harriet Miers and Valerie Plame and Karl Rove and Scooter What's-his-name, perhaps we could recast the reinvention. Oh, no, we couldn't. This is just too big and dumb. Bit like too many of Adam Sandler's movies, really.

The disk's so-so rollcall of extras includes First Down and Twenty-Five to Life, a feature with director Peter Segal, Sandler, cast and crew talking about filming the movie; The Care and Feeding of Pro Athletes, about how they kept the cast fed (riveting. Er, and aren't these actors?), Lights, Camera, Touchdown!, how they shot the football scenes.

There's a series of deleted, extended and alternate scenes, with commentary explaining their absence from Segal, outtakes and bloopers, plus the mandatory commentary track from the director and a couple of music videos, Errtime by Nelly and Here Comes the Boom by POD.

* DVD, Video Rental Today