THE LONGEST YARD -- Movie Review by Porfle

(This review originally appeared online at Bumscorner.com in 2007. Warning: may contain spoilers.)

I just fished a copy of THE LONGEST YARD (1974) out of the budget bin at Wal-Mart. Sometimes you actually do find buried treasure in those big piles of dreck. This time I was able to get one of the greatest sports movies ever made (some call it the best football movie of all time) for five-and-a-half bucks.

Thanks to the release of the Adam Sandler remake, which I haven't seen yet (so far, so good), we have the original now in a special "Lockdown Edition" complete with two featurettes and a commentary track featuring Burt Reynolds and producer Albert S. Ruddy (THE GODFATHER). The commentary is relaxed, enjoyable, and informative, and slows down only when the two participants get caught watching the movie and forget they're supposed to be talking about it.

Burt stars as Paul Crewe, a disgraced former NFL quarterback who has a nasty breakup with his sugar mama (Anitra Ford) and, after leading the cops on a high-speed chase in her stolen car and then resisting arrest, ends up in a Florida prison in the middle of a swamp.

The stiff-arsed Warden Hazen (Eddie Albert) turns out to be a football fanatic who has arranged to have Crewe sent to his prison to help shape up his semi-pro team that is composed of the prison's guards, in exchange for an easy sentence. But this makes the captain of the team and head guard Captain Knauer (Ed Lauter) jealous, and he warns Crewe to refuse the warden's offer or suffer heapin' helpings of physical abuse. Crewe turns the warden down, and gets beaten up anyway.

After some horrific experiences on swamp detail and a stretch in the "hot box", Crewe gives in to the warden's request. But Hazen has a new plan in mind--Crewe will get together a team comprised of prisoners which will play a "tune-up" game against the guards. This easy victory will bolster the guards' confidence and make them more ready to take on the task of winning the championship of their division.

Crewe initially sees no chance of making a dent against the guards' team with the ragtag group of misfits at his disposal, but as the guards continue to heap abuse and indignity on the prisoners at every turn, he eventually begins to entertain the notion of actually beating and humiliating them and the warden in front of a crowd of spectators. All he has to do is overcome the prisoners' intial dislike for him, and entice the more hesitant ones with the promise of being able to get physical with the guards.

Burt Reynolds in his prime was a really good actor who could be suitably intense while often allowing a dry, self-mocking sense of humor to to permeate his demeanor. Much of the script, written by Tracy Keenan Wynn from a story by Ruddy, was intended to be straight drama until Reynolds and his castmates started playing around with their characters and making things more interesting and fun. But the humor never detracts from the seriousness of the situations, and the result is a story that can be enjoyed on both levels at the same time.

Crewe's best pal and manager of the prisoners' team, The Mean Machine, is the resident scrounger, Caretaker (James Hampton), who can get anything for anybody in the joint, including getting them laid. Hampton is one of the finest character actors in the business--his most recent high-profile role was as Dr. Jerry Woolridge in SLING BLADE--and deserves a lot more recognition than he's gotten over the years. Trouble is, as opposed to guys like Marlon Brando or Sean Penn who make great acting seem like a hernia-inducing ordeal, Hampton makes it look easy. Which is why he's so good.

The rest of the cast is pretty awesome as well. Eddie Albert was utterly convincing whether playing a sleazy suit-and-tie sadist like Warden Hazen or the lovable Oliver Wendell Douglas of "Green Acres." Ed Lauter as Captain Knauer is another fine character actor whose consistently good performances add to whatever he appears in. "Dick" Kiel, yet to make a big splash as "Jaws" in the James Bond series, is funny as one of the prisoners. Other fine supporting players include Charles Tyner, Sonny Shroyer ("Enos" of TV's "Dukes of Hazzard"), Harry Caesar, Michael Conrad ("Hill Street Blues"), Mike Henry, and an incredibly bee-hived Bernadette Peters ("You ever find any spiders in there?" Crewe asks her) as the warden's sex-starved secretary.

Several former pro football players such as Ernie Wheelwright and Ray Nitschke are on hand as well for added authenticity. This really pays off during the big game, which takes up almost 45 minutes of screen time. The plays are real--director Robert Aldrich (THE DIRTY DOZEN, FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) simply filmed these guys playing grungy, hard-ass football and picked the footage that fit the script. No namby-pamby pretend tackling or "acting" here. One of the joys of THE LONGEST YARD for the sports fan is that, for the most part, this is real football played by real football players. The staged stuff which occurs here and there only adds to the excitement and hilarity of the situations, especially when Crewe comes up with a way of eliminating the scariest member of the competition, Bodanski (both onscreen and off--Ray Nitschke wasn't screwing around) with a forward pass to the groin, not once but twice. Various clotheslines ("I think I broke his f***ing neck!" Kiel's character rejoices), pile-ups, sucker punches, and other highly-unsportsmanlike activity also add to the fun.

The suspense is heightened when Warden Hazen, aghast at the sight of his guards losing to the convicts, makes Crewe a halftime offer he can't refuse--throw the game, or do hard time in prison for roughly twenty extra years. Crewe, always the type to look out for number one, must decide whether to give in or sacrifice himself for the sake of his teammates, whom he has given the chance to earn some dignity and self-respect for a change. And head guard Knauer, after seeing the warden for the slimeball that he is and gaining a grudging respect for Crewe, will soon be forced to make a decision of his own, which may include blowing Crewe's brains out.

If you love good movies, football, Burt Reynolds, big ugly sweaty guys rolling around in the mud, or all of the above, then THE LONGEST YARD is a film that should definitely be on your must-see list. Like I said, I haven't seen the Adam Sandler remake so I don't know how they compare, but I'm willing to bet that one of them will be remembered as one of the greatest football films ever made when the other is little more than a dim memory. I'll let you decide which is which.

THE LONGEST YARD -- Movie Review by Porfle

FORGET ABOUT IT -- Movie Review by Porfle

(This review originally appeared online at Bumscorner.com in 2006.)

After suffering through FORGET ABOUT IT (2006), that's exactly what I wanted to do.  It's advertised as being "from a producer of AS GOOD AS IT GETS and JERRY MAGUIRE", but he must've been lost in the shuffle since IMDb lists about twenty executive, associate, and co-producers with their fingers in this pie.  Maybe they just wanted a lot of people around to share the blame.  Anyway, they should've gotten the producer of GET SHORTY instead, since that's the kind of movie this one desperately wants to be.

Michael Paloma plays a portly wiseguy named Nitti who steals four million dollars from Don Giovanni (also Paloma, doing a bad Brando impersonation) and disappears into the witness protection program.  He's relocated to a desert resort community in Phoenix, Arizona, where his new neighbors are retired oldster pals Sam, Carl, and Eddie (Burt Reynolds, Robert Loggia, and Charles Durning).  Before long, they stumble upon Nitti's buried stash and start living it up along with their gal pal, former Vegas showgirl Christine DeLee (Raquel Welch), until the wiseguy gets wise. 

In one sequence, the three geezers visit a nudie bar and throw wads of cash around, gaining the full attention of all the girls and angering some faux bikers who feel left out.  As we've already learned from ARMAGEDDON, there's always a gang of faux bikers who get mad when you throw too much money around in a nudie bar.  But not to worry, because these are three tough old coots and they beat up the bikers.  Really, it's just as funny as it sounds.

Meanwhile, a Mafia hit squad led by tough-guy Richard Grieco and a duo of greedy FBI agents with the hots for each other are zeroing in on Nitti's location, and we just know that when all these various characters converge it's going to be a real melee.  Not a funny melee, though--just your standard unfunny melee.  I don't think anything funny actually occurs during this entire movie, except maybe the parts where Burt and Raquel perform "Dueling Facelifts." 

If you're one of those people who shout "Oh, boy!  Richard Grieco!" you may enjoy the parts that he's in.  Fan fave Tim Thomerson shows up again (he seems to be doing that a lot lately) as one of them cowboy-hat-wearin' car salesmen.  There's even a brief, thankless cameo by legendary comedianne Phyllis Diller, who probably wished she were back doing a crappy Bob Hope comedy instead.  Guys like Bob Hope knew how to make crappy comedies that looked pretty good and were sorta funny.  Even some of today's lowest-budget indy filmmakers are turning out comedies better than this with far less resources and no big names.

Technically, FORGET ABOUT IT is subpar in every respect.  BJ Davis directs it with less finesse than one of those comedy specials that Don Adams and Don Rickles used to churn out.  The camerawork and lighting are dreary.  Even the editing is bad--shots are stacked on top of each other like Jenga blocks, and with each new scene comes yet another blast of overbearing music to convince us of how funny it is.  There's a shootout at the airport in the closing minutes that actually might've been slightly cool if that awful music weren't there to pound it into the tarmac.

None of the lead actors really put much into their characters, and you can hardly blame them.  Burt coasts on his usual comedy persona at its most casual.  Raquel, still lookin' good despite the obligatory surgical enhancement, isn't going for an Oscar here.  The fine actor Charles Durning seems lost most of the time in a role that doesn't give him much to do besides look old.  For his part, Robert Loggia tries to put some spark into this clunky story, which is no less than you'd expect from the only man alive tough enough to challenge Ben Gazzara as King of the Universe.

All in all, this has got to be one of the lamest comedies I've ever seen, and I've seen AT LONG LAST LOVE.  It makes DELTA FARCE look like a Marx Brothers film.  If you happen to spot FORGET ABOUT IT lurking on a video store shelf my advice is to do exactly what the title suggests.  I wish I could.

FORGET ABOUT IT -- Movie Review by Porfle

END GAME -- Movie Review by Porfle

(NOTE: This review originally appeared online at Bumscorner.com in 2006.)

1993's IN THE LINE OF FIRE gave us Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent on the trail of a wacko assassin whose goal was to kill the President. END GAME (2006) opens with the assassination of the President and then shows us how Secret Service agent Alex Thomas (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) discovers a dark conspiracy behind the "lone assassin" and puts his life on the line to find out who's behind it.

Both Eastwood's Frank Horrigan and Gooding's Thomas suffer from guilt related to a President's death; Horrigan, because he wasn't quick enough to take the bullet meant for JFK, and Thomas, because the assassin's bullet struck the President only because it changed direction after passing through his outstretched hand.

As Thomas takes some time off from the job to languish in his lakeside home and see how fast he can drain several bottles of hooch, investigative reporter Kate Crawford (Angie Harmon, GLASS HOUSE: THE GOOD MOTHER) starts digging into the killer's past.

She uncovers a link between him and a secretive government agency that may have been involved in the assassination, and is alarmed to find that everyone she is receiving information from is being systematically murdered by some bad guys in a black van.

When she goes to Agent Thomas' house for further help, the black van shows up there as well, and things get rather explosive. Thomas begins to buy Kate's conspiracy theories after he himself becomes a target, and together they work their way toward the truth as things get darker and more dangerous at every turn.

END GAME isn't quite a top-of-the-line Hollywood blockbuster but it's definitely worth watching. The production values are very good and the story kept me interested from start to finish.

There are plenty of great action scenes, too, especially when Thomas and a ten-man strike force invade a factory where the black-van guys are holed up and get into a furious shoot-out with them, which leads to a cool car chase in which the main bad guy (Peter Greene, who played "Zed" in PULP FICTION) attempts to discourage Thomas from pursuing him by machine-gunning oncoming vehicles off the road. At first Thomas is too determined to let even this slow him down, but the next vehicle headed toward them is a loaded school bus...

Everyone behind the camera does fine work here, and the cast is highly capable. Cuba Gooding has a talent for creating sympathetic characters without overplaying, which he demonstrates here with his deft performance. Former "Baywatch Nights" regular Angie Harmon is particularly good as well -- her intrepid reporter is likably tenacious and funny, and she and Gooding make a great team.

Old fave James Woods is excellent, as usual, but doesn't get nearly as much screen time as I hoped after seeing him on the DVD cover, though he makes the time he does have count. Familiar television veteran Jack Scalia gives us a likable President (for a little while, anyway), and his First Lady is well played by Anne Archer, who was the wife of Harrison Ford in two of the "Jack Ryan" movies.

The homeless man who first supplies Kate Crawford with information before being bumped off will be recognized by "Dark Shadows" fans -- he's David Selby, who played the werewolf Quentin Collins on that classic series. And the vicious killer who tries to terminate Agent Thomas's investigation, as I mentioned before, is played by none other than "Zed" from PULP FICTION, Peter Greene. ("Zed's dead, baby...Zed's dead.")

Not coming off quite as well, however, is Burt Reynolds as a retired Army general who still likes to keep his irons in the political fire. Burt's heart doesn't really seem to be in his performance here, and his alarmingly advanced state of cosmetic surgery (looking at his tightly-stretched face may give you a tension headache after awhile) distracts from what ultimately ends up being a pretty irrelevant character anyway.

After suffering through [a particularly bad movie] last night, I needed to watch a real movie to help me drag myself out of the depths of cinematic despair, and END GAME was just the ticket. It's not in the same league as IN THE LINE OF FIRE or one of the Jack Ryan movies, but I was certainly very well entertained for an hour and a half, and that's good enough for me.

END GAME -- Movie Review by Porfle