Movie review

  • 2005-08-10
The Longest Yard

Young Adam

Les

II Commandements

The Longest Yard
This comedy has entertaining moments, and there is some fun to be had once the American football gets started. However, "The Longest Yard," is really another lackluster 1970's remake. Besides all the pointless celebrity cameos, this film is a mixture of formulaic storytelling, cliched jokes and embellished stereotypes. Poor Burt Reynolds, the star of the 1974 version - doesn't he have better things to do than appear in a superfluous and almost mocking cameo? This movie can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a mindless slapstick funny-film or a social commentary? Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the filmmakers know themselves. Still, some people find a beaten-up Adam Sandler the funniest thing in the world and to them this movie probably won't be a disappointment. 

1/2 ( Julie Vinten )

Entertaining drivel about washed up ex-football superstar Paul Crewe (Adam Sandler) who gets sent to prison after a drunken run-in with the police. The corrupt prison warden forces Crewe to assemble a team of inmates to play against the brutal prison guards who are in training to win an amateur league title. Naturally, the cons jump at the chance to take revenge on their truncheon-wielding oppressors. Based on the 1974 film starring Burt Reynolds, who also makes a guest appearance in this new version, "The Longest Yard" is an unashamedly stupid film that hardcore football fans will probably love. It does have some funny moments, but given the endless jokes about homosexuals, penis size and muscle power, the football becomes little more than a testicular-shaped metaphor for male sexuality.

( Laimons Juris G )

Young Adam

Director David Mackenzie bases this feature, placed in 1950's Scotland, on Alexander Trocchi's novel. This is a study of a sociopath. Joe (Ewan McGregor) is a bleak man with an alienated mind who feels nothing for any of his endless sexual encounters, not even for the young woman, whose dead body he later pulls out of the water. Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor share a poisonous chemistry and Peter Mullan is forceful as always. "Young Adam" is an atmospheric and, in many ways, alluring movie. It's also stilted, slow, detached and emotionally cold. The movie feels repetitive due to the lack of character development. And perhaps the title is overdoing things a little 'sgetting biblical goes somewhere the story and movie don't call for.

( Julie Vinten )

Joe (Ewan McGregor) is a handsome young man working as a helping hand on a barge along with Les (Peter Mullan) and his wife Ella (Tilda Swinton) in 1950's Scotland. One day Joe and Les come across the bloated, semi-naked corpse of a young woman in the water. It's clear from the start that the corpse is somehow related to Joe's past and the film gradually reveals just how through a series of flashbacks. The cast is brilliant and McGregor gives perhaps his best performance to date as the laconic Joe, a frustrated writer who strikes up an intense sexual affair with Ella behind Les' back. This is a sparse, intelligent and subtle film that brilliantly captures a time, a place and an uneasy look upon a face.

( Laimons Juris G )

Les II Commandements

In this French "Jackass" rip-off, God requests that a group of friends fulfil 11 funny tasks to make the world a funnier place. The funny tasks include starting a food-fight in a supermarket and stopping traffic with a song performance. But it looks like many of the pranks are staged and that the people being harassed by our protagonists are in on it. That wouldn't matter, however, if the jokes simply made us laugh. The fun that the group has doesn't transmit well to the audience - you would have to be in on the action to find it at all amusing. "Jackass" was funny for a while, however, it's doubtful that the get-hurt-and-laugh-about-it concept would have become popular, had this inane and totally unfunny movie been the one to invent it. 

( Julie Vinten )

A group of young French men accidentally find God when they all take a leak together in an alleyway after getting drunk one night. God commands them to do a whole load of stupid things in order to make the world a funnier and better place, and promises them a special treat in return. The commandments range from abusing police officers to see who can get the biggest fine to being pummeled with tennis balls by a professional player while having a picnic on a tennis court. Clearly inspired by Jackass, this sort of public humiliation is desperately unfunny and, at times, it's even offensive. You almost hope God will command the whole lot of them to leap off a cliff, taking the rushes of the film with them. 

( Laimons Juris G )

 

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