MOVIE REVIEW Remake a long way off original 'Longest Yard'

Though the movie is lame, it's still a decent spoof on the game of football.
By ROGER MOORE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Burt Reynolds has aged into a skinny, owlish geezer with beady bug-eyes poking out from under his latest toupee.
But even at 69, he still looks like more of a football player than Adam Sandler.
They've gone and remade one of Burt's best, the surly two-fisted "Longest Yard," with the once and future "Waterboy" as its star. George Lucas can brag about his "Star Wars" effects. But he didn't have to animate the perfect spirals Sandler plainly isn't throwing in this still agreeable goof on the game.
The story
Sandler stars as Paul Crewe, the drunken, disgraced Florida State alum and ex-NFL MVP whose joyride in his girlfriend's Bentley lands him in a Texas federal prison. And in Texas, his warden (James Cromwell) tells him, they take two things seriously.
"Prison. And football."
Crewe is billy-club beaten into leading an inmate team up against the steroid-addled guards.
Crewe, with the aid of the fast-talking "Caretaker" (Chris Rock) and grizzled ex-Heisman winner and current con Nate Scarborough (Reynolds) rounds up inmate players, convincing some through tests of manhood, and preps for "the big game" that eats up the last third of the film.
Sandler's current favorite director, Peter Segal ("50 First Dates"), limits the prison scenes to the broadest of cliches, probably a smart move. Then he lets Sandler do what Sandler has been doing in recent years -- which is not much. The actor who made slow-burns and tantrum-tossing a trademark does none of that here. He lands a few one-liners.
But that's what Rock is here for. He's all "You white boys" jokes and "Can you give a brother a little hustle?" A brother could build a pretty lucrative standup career out of such observations.
Tracy Morgan throws himself into leading the gay prison cheerleading squad.
Segal reduces women to the sum total of their breasts. Once or twice, he leaves out faces altogether when shooting bit players. Hooters should sue. Courtney Cox Arquette's brief appearance is memorable for her alarming cleavage. Oscar-winner Cloris Leachman was added for some comic cheesecake.
And the big game? Savage as ever. The "rules" are that there are no rules -- body slams, high kicks and head-butts.
Brian Bosworth, who failed at football and the movies, and Michael Irvin, Bill Romanowski, and pro-wrestlers Steve Austin and Bill Goldberg are the most prominent athletes you'll recognize. Singer Nelly convincingly plays a running back.
ESPN signed on, which means that every overexposed sportscaster and sportswriter in the country prostituted himself for the chance to "act" in an Adam Sandler movie.
Redeemable qualities
It's incredibly lame, but there are bright spots. The most interesting guy on or off the field is maniacally played by Lobo Sebastian as a chain-smoking defensive back. That's the outlaw feel that the original film had that the new one lacks.
But it's a movie worth remaking simply because this spoof of "the big game" reduces football to the genetic freak show it has become.
The great Olympian Brian Oldfield, a mountain of muscle in his day, still gave the best football put-down ever, when asked why he didn't put on the pads instead of shot-putting and hammer-throwing
In football, he said, the whistle blows "and it's just a fight. I win fights."