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Mean Machine
***
Cinema
Releases - December 28, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 99
minutes. Directed by Barry Skolnick. Written by Chris Baker, Andrew Day,
Charlie Fletcher; based on the 1974 movie "The Longest Yard" written by Tracy
Keenan Wynn. Starring Vinnie Jones, Jason Statham, Danny Dyer, David Kelly,
David Hemmings, Robbie Gee, Vas Blackwood.
It's been a few years since I've seen the classic
Robert Aldrich comedy "The Longest Yard", and that might help to explain
why I won't be bitching too much about the remake, "Mean
Machine". The original featured Burt Reynolds in the lead role and
a legendary fifty-minute climax of American football. The new picture has
Vinnie Jones and some sitcom stars playing soccer. But if you're unfamiliar
with the original, or if its quality has faded from your memory, you might
find that this version is better than it looks.
Jones stars as a former England captain, disgraced
and driven to the bottle after a match-rigging scandal ruined his career.
He goes for a drunken joyride and assaults a couple of cops one afternoon,
and finds himself locked up for three years in a prison where the corrupt
governor has gambling debts and thinks he can win his money back by betting
on local sporting events. The plot moves along and sets up relationships
in a way that leads Jones to coaching a team of his former inmates for a
game against a team of prison guards.
In the run-up to the big match there are less
of the poxy attempts at 'crowd-pleasing' humour that we get from most
high-profile British movies; instead, the screenplay makes the best of its
source material, and offers us some genuine wit. Despite the fact that half
the cast of the prison gardening comedy "Greenfingers" are on show, the
filmmakers have avoided obvious, clunky reliance on the familiar group of
prison movie characters (Notable Charming Hero, Token Black Guy, Token Old
Guy, Token Big Guy) and used a big cast of seemingly individual personalities.
Jones doesn't try to be funnier than he is, and so he ends up being funnier
than we thought he could be; I especially liked a scene in which he tries
to convince the prison psycho to join his squad, and the dialogue reflects
the talk of school playtime. "Would you like to, um, play with us?" he asks.
Later, on the field, Jones finds himself dealing with a scrap with the line
"Now tell him you didn't mean to do that!"
The climax doesn't compare to the epic fifty-minute
stretch of Aldrich's film, but it lasts twenty minutes, which ain't bad,
and I would submit that soccer is a more cinematic game than American football.
Less bone-crunching, maybe, but it has less equipment and simpler rules,
and is therefore leaner and easier to follow. 21st Century England doesn't
quite have the atmosphere of tough 1970s America, and I missed the charm
of Burt -- but a remake of "The Longest Yard" is a hard thing to pull off,
and "Mean Machine" is better than we have any reason to
expect.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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