Mean Machine

The classic Burt Reynolds football-behind-bars flick The Longest Yard crosses the pond and gets an appropriate British accent in the process in this rough-and-tumble mixture of sports and action-comedy. Danny Mehan (Vinnie Jones) was one of the biggest stars in British football (what Americans call ...more

Derivative, brutal, pointless, cynical, and stupid, Mean Machine still manages to be fairly entertaining. It's a jazzed up remake of the equally brutal and entertaining, but slightly more complex Robert Aldrich film The Longest Yard. Aldrich, director of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Dirty Dozen, was an original, and The Longest Yard's bone-crunching machismo seemed more earned than it does in Mean Machine, where it sometimes comes off as posturing, not on the part of ...more