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Knock me down with a feather. The Longest Yard did A$10.816m box office in Australia. Once you crack the ten million dollar mark, you're home free as a local success.

So the answer to Adam Sandler is that the viewers make him rich and happy. He can do anything, he can take a fair average piece of old time crap and people will turn up to roll Jaffas down the aisle. Hey, they did the same for The Dukes of Hazard. Is there any wonder anybody over the mental age of ten stopped going to the cinema awhile ago?

Feeling consternated about it all, I got the old Robert Aldrich chestnut down off the shelf and took another look. Sure enough, it's just a tamer re-run of the formula for his war show The Dirty Dozen. This time the team that gets assembled is a footie team of cons anxious to take down the warden's team of nasty guards. Burt Reynolds is on hand to flaunt his beary hairy chest (these days he'd have a fair amount of bling bling as well) and he grimaces through it in what was the patented Burt Reyolds way. The coverage was rough, and the show flung together in a slap happy way that gave it a little mindless energy.

Fast forward to the present, and you have Adam Sandler playing the Burt Reynolds role, as a down and out football star sent down for drink driving. He has to pull together a footy team to take on the warden's sadistic guards, so we get plenty of gridiron action, done with the kind of style and flourish you can expect these days of shows with access to CGI's and money.

About the only time I've managed to handle Sandler was in his iconoclastic and different performance in Punch-Drunk Love, but that's as much due to director Paul Thomas Anderson as to Sandler's willingness to transform himself. Here it's back to Sandler being as cute as Bucky Beaver, and the patented Sandler slapstick and yep ... it's not the original, it's an Adam Sandler flick. Get used to it, or give up. I give up.

As a bonus, you get Chris Rock as key comic support. But if you really like Chris Rock, do yourself a favour and pick up some of his stand up HBO comedy shows, now out and about, where Rock shows a fierce comedy intelligence and sense of timing, worthy of Richard Pryor. What you have here is Chris Rock making money the same way Pryor did with a lot of his movies, so he could afford to shoot his car.

Having fallen on hard times, it's no wonder Burt Reynolds is enjoying his brief resurgence, so he turns up to play coach, and delivers a performance as broad and as wide as any old ham who thinks it's enough to lay it on with a trowel. James Cromwell, who's done this kind of thing a million times, is the evil warden, while you get Nelly as a bonus (can we take steak knives instead? Where's Boondocks when you need it?)

Well it's good to know that a camped up comedy about American football based on an old 1974 camped up comedy about American football can do business in Australia. But it was interesting to see Friday Night Lights was marked down to $7.95 in the used bins pretty soon after it's rental release, and I give The Longest Yard, which hits the rental shelves October 26 '05, a month before the same thing happens to it. The market is always right, and the home vid crowd are a tougher audience than Sandler lovers. Kick him in the groin, that should get a laugh or two.

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