When I first sat down to write my review for the Longest Yard I had a Charlie Kaufman experience. I started with a great opening that gave insight to the career of Adam Sandler. I even quoted Mary Poppins. But when I was finished I wasn’t pleased. The review felt to me like nothing more than rambling words speaking of nothing, so I scratched that and started over. I realized that I was looking too hard for big explanations in a film that didn’t offer any. The most I could make of the Longest Yard was that it was one of those films that we enjoy for no apparent reason other than that they exist on some sort of comedic or dramatic level. Ah ha, now we’re on to something and so I can now get to the review.

I could tell you that the Longest Yard doesn’t work because star Adam Sandler isn’t believable as a football hero, but that seems like an argument critics make only because they are scrambling for reasons not to admit that they actually enjoyed themselves at an Adam Sandler movie. I could also tell you how the movie doesn’t work when succumbing to those infamous comic asides that no Happy Madisen produced comedy is without. You know the ones that are supposedly so funny that they bring the entire film to a halt so that the audience can laugh and recover. The Tracy Morgan character in this film comes to mind, who is the head of a group of “girls” in prison: supplying the film with that extra dose of gay humor just to make sure.

I could tell you all of that but why bother? Everyone who has their heart set on seeing this film will anyway, and probably will be satisfied with it. But for those of us who could just as well do without Adam Sandler, what we don’t realize is just how well the film inhabits itself. It’s not as good as we could hope, but far better than we could expect.

Sandler is Paul Crewe, an ex football hero who becomes a joke after being accused of throwing a crucial football game for his team. After a night of drinking Crewe decides to take his girlfriend’s car for a joyride and ends up in a jail in Texas. We learn that the warden went to great lengths to get Crewe into his facility. His reasoning is that he wants Crewe to provide his team of guards with advice on how to play better. Crewe’s idea is to play the guards against a team they know they can beat in order to get their spirits up. The Warden is all for the idea and orders Crewe to assemble a team of inmates to play the guards.

That’s all you really require of the plot, the rest of the film is a combination of attitude and nonsense, sometimes at the same time, making for some good laughs. When the film has the nerve to move beyond its Adam Sandler influence and play it straight as a reckless comedy about a football team comprised of prison convicts, than it works because we sense that director Peter Segal is being honest to the intent of the film, and therefore honest to the audience viewing it. A scene in which the warden has the inmate’s practice field flooded; only to have them practice on it anyway is pure reckless joy. We are also surprised how well the film knows how its characters should function. The climatic football game starts out exactly how we could expect it to, the inmate’s sole concern is to pummel the guards, and we laugh. We also laugh when the first quarter ends with a play so reckless and so amateurish that if it didn’t work I would have been disappointed.

We are also surprised at how Segal is able to create a large cast of characters that are both likable and recognizable. We already know Crewe because he is played by Sandler and we already know Caretaker because he is played by Chris Rock and we know Nate Scarborough as he is played by Burt Reynolds (star of the original 1974 Longest Yard), but the surprise is how the rest of the inmates are all so entertaining in their own sort of goofy way. That’s why, when an important character dies, we feel the sympathy of the loss, but can also step outside the moment and smile to ourselves when Cheeseburger Eddy puts a Quarter-Ponder with Cheese on the deceased’s grave.

Now comes the part of the review where I could say that a better film could have been made from this exact material and told you how that could have been possible, but why bother with that either? It is my job to judge the movie that I have seen and not the one that I would have liked to see. The Longest Yard is not a brilliant film or even that great of one, but I’m sure there are a lot of worse ways to pass a rainy Saturday night.