Rating: 
Summary: Hey, its a football classic, enjoy it for what it is!
Review: "The Longest Yard" is a movie that holds up well with time. I have seen the movie almost fifty times in various stages on television and I never appreciated the full-uncut movie until I saw it on DVD!Not a great movie by any stretch, but it still has some of the most classic lines in any sports movie. Who can forget lines like "History" or "I told you I broke his Freaking neck!" Personally I think my favorite line is the line that Michael Conrad tells Burt Reynolds in the jail cell. It's may be true that you can only leave prison with two things, but I have never heard it put quite this way. Technically the disc is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. It has a Dolby Digital mono soundtrack presented in both English and French. There are no additional features. Bottom Line: It's not a great disc, but still worth every cent! It's a strong movie with drama and a little comedy. Burt Reynolds once said it was his favorite role and that shows. If you have seen it, chances are you will agree, and if you haven't, give it a try and see for yourself why it's one of the best football movies ever made!
Rating: 
Summary: Great entertainment, but a lousy slant
Review: The Longest Yard I watched this movie again last night. It is entertaining. Burt Reynolds, a pro football star, is thrown in prison (unjustly, of course) for the minor, unimportant crime of working his girlfriend over and then resisting arrest. In the joint he runs into Eddie Albert, who plays a football fanatic warden. Since Reynolds, who is an ex-quarterback in the pros, lets Albert enlist his help to get his team of correctional officers--referred to throughout the movie, of course, as "guards"--a championship. Of course the inmates end up playing the officers, who are depicted as brutes, as they always are by Hollywood, and after losing, and then regaining the convicts' trust, Reynolds, with great skill and courage, and despite Albert's threat to "throw away the key," beats the prison officers and thereby makes everyone happy except Eddie Albert and the vicious, brutish "guards." The movie works well as entertainment, and will please everyone. Everyone, that is, except for the public employees who work unarmed in prisons, sometimes called "The Toughest Beat," and once again, as in "Cool Hand Luke" and all of the other depictions by Hollywood, show them as the heavies, and the poor, misunderstood, innocent, courageous, good looking, wrongly convicted convicts as the good guys. Too bad someone doesn't, just once, show it as it really is! Joseph Pierre,
Author of THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS: Our Journey Through Eternity
Rating:
Summary: "Semi-pro's a joke"
Review: An ex-football star (Reynolds) gets in a fight with a girlfriend, takes off with her car, dumps it in the lake and gets in an altercation with two cops who try to arrest him in a bar. This ends up getting Paul Crew (Reynolds) some hard time in prison. Eddie Albert is the warden and is very proud of his semi-pro football team, who's players consist of prison guards. He suggests that Crew ("the wrecking Crew") gets a team of prison inmates to play the guards. Crew just wants to "do his time and get out of here". But he may be doing more time than he thought if he refuses to come up with a team to play the guards. Crew puts his team together with some difficulty. He's not worried about winning, just surviving, but this is the prisoners chance to feel equal to the guards, to feel like real men again. They're taking this game very seriously and before it's over, so does Crew. You will recognize many of the actors in this show, all play good supporting roles.
Rating:
Summary: "Semi-pro's a joke"
Review: An ex-football star (Reynolds) gets in a fight with a girlfriend, takes off with her car, dumps it in the lake and gets in an altercation with two cops who try to arrest him in a bar. This ends up getting Paul Crew (Reynolds) some hard time in prison. Eddie Albert is the warden and is very proud of his semi-pro football team, who's players consist of prison guards. He suggests that Crew ("the wrecking Crew") gets a team of prison inmates to play the guards. Crew just wants to "do his time and get out of here". But he may be doing more time than he thought if he refuses to come up with a team to play the guards. Crew puts his team together with some difficulty. He's not worried about winning, just surviving, but this is the prisoners chance to feel equal to the guards, to feel like real men again. They're taking this game very seriously and before it's over, so does Crew. You will recognize many of the actors in this show, all play good supporting roles.
Rating: 
Summary: Great movie, terrible video version
Review: Being a big fan of this movie for over ten years, it is hard for me to write that this VHS version is a rip-off. In the box it says that it is a "special video version". If this is the best the studios can do, then we're better off with the regular versions. The problems are the following: to begin with, there should be a widescreen version which will let us enjoy the compositions much better. Second, the scene where the Burt Reynolds character is talking with the Eddie Albert character while they walk is missing. This scene is important because in it, Paul Crew asks for special things, the most important one being the banishing of Unger from the practices. This causes Unger's attempt at revenge which ends with the dead of Caretaker. Third, the music at the end has been changed from "you're gonna be a football hero" to "when the saints come marching in". The former piece is much more appropriate than the second one. Finally, the end credits are horrible. The old ones were somewhat small for the tv screen, but were much nicer than these ugly, crude ones. I really wish the studios would stop tampering with great movies like this one. Instead, they should try to enhance their artistic value by trying to present them the way they were shown in movie theaters, and not for tv audiences.
Rating:
Summary: Burt
Review: Burt gets thrown in the pokey for shaving points off a football game and no one likes that. So he plays football against the pigs and wins. So he's still in prison and it didn't really solve anything.
Rating:
Summary: One of Burt's only good ones
Review: Burt Reynolds ...... With the exception of this and Boogie Nights he hasn't done anything worth while. But this movie rocks. With a slick combination of humour, action, and football this is the ultimate guy movie. If you like this check out "Slap Shot".
Rating: 
Summary: Where's "Saturday Night Special?"
Review: First off, I love the original film "The Longest Yard." However, as some of you have already pointed out, this "Special Home Video Version" has been tampered with to the point of ruining the film for long-time fans. As already pointed out, the closing song "You Gotta Be a Football Hero" had been changed to "When The Saints Go Marching In," and a scene with Crewe and the Warden has been deleted. That's bad news! What I don't think anyone has mentioned is that the song "Saturday Night Special" was playing in the original film when Paul Crewe has the car chase with the police, then dumps his car into the bay. This song was cut out of the lousy, worthless "Home Video Version." Sorry I can't be more positive. But this film should either be restored or discontinued to save people from throwing away their money.
Dear Paramount....please restore this film!
Rating:
Summary: The Longest Yard was a '70's classic prison genre movie.
Review: i didn't read the book however it's a great movie with gritty performances by Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, and Robert Tessier. The football game between the guards and the inmates is hilarious. Besides Deliverance, this is Burt Reynold's finest acting moment. A great video to rent from time to time. END
Rating:
Summary: Just a friendly football game, the prisoners vs. the guards
Review: I want to make the argument that "The Longest Yard" is an important film in the history of the movies because this 1974 comedy represents the point in cinematic history where a guy getting hit between the legs was funny for the last time. To be specific it was the moment in the film where it happened for the second time, which was even funnier than the first time it had happened, which was just a minute earlier in the movie. Ever since then I have not found these scenes to be anywhere near as funny because all such efforts are just pale imitations of what happens here.
"The Longest Yard" is solid B-movie material from start to finish. Burt Reynolds is Paul Crewe, a former pro quarterback who was banned from the sport for shaving points and ended up in prison for having some fun with the cops joy riding. In a nice example of casting against type Eddie Albert is the sadistic warden who is quite proud of the football team he has put together from the prison guards. So he decides that Crewe should put together a team from the prisoners for a friendly little game of football. Crewe is inclined not to be accommodating, but the warden, no doubt sensing a failure to communicate, persuades the ex-jock to get with the game plan.
We have to go through some rather trite and tired routines as Crewe puts together his team just so we can get to the fun part of the movie, which is the big football game. Obviously the cons are playing for self-respect and if the warden is stupid enough to give them the opportunity to pay back the guards for their brutal treatment under the guise of a football game, then we should just enjoy the fun. The set up might be stupid, but the game itself is one of the better staged pigskin competitions we have seen in a movie to date. Besides, the Mean Machine uses the drop kick, which I have always wanted to see ever since I read about it in "Gil Thorp" way back when. Certainly director Robert Aldrich takes the time to play the came and he makes excellent use of the split-screen to avoid having to constantly cut between the action on the field and the drama on the sidelines.
Reynolds is certainly the star of the film (he tells his team, "The most important thing to remember is: to protect your quarterback. ME!"), and the ex-Florida State football player certainly makes for a believable jock on the field (hey, the guy was drafted by the Baltimore Colts), while Albert clearly relishes the chance to forget all about Eva Gabor and have fun with the dark side. "Iron" Mike Conrad, before he became a cult figure as Sgt. Esterhaus on "Hill Street Blues," has a memorable turn as Nate Scarboro, one of the cons whose knees are not as strong as his heart so he has to settle for being the coach of the Mean Machine. Ed Lauter is Captain Knauer, the head of the guards, who manages not to be a total jerk about what is going on in the end as the film goes for one last over the top moment at the end.
Not to be mistaken for high art, "The Longest Yard" is a party film, perfect when you are in the mood for a little football. It was actually up for an Oscar for Best Film Editing (Michael Luciano), undoubtedly for that split screen work, and even won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Musical/Comedy (beating out "The Front Page," "Harry and Tonto," "The Little Prince" and "The Three Musketeers"). Having already been made as a soccer (the other "football) movie ("Mean Machine"), "The Longest Yard" is currently being remade with Adam Sandler and James Cromwell (and Burt Reynolds as Coach Nate Scarboro). I wonder if Brian Bosworth played "Kill the Star" with Sandler the way Ray Nitschke did with Reynolds in the original. There could be some very interesting outtakes on that DVD down the road.
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