Knowing The Score

THE LONGEST YARD Imagine, if you will, Adam Sandler in the Burt Reynolds role of the macho outdoorsman in Deliverance. It's impossible, right? Yet it really isn't that much easier to accept Sandler in Reynolds' old role of football-star-turned-convict Paul "Wrecking" Crewe in the remake of The Longest Yard. Reynolds, himself a college gridiron star until an injury forced an alternate career path, excelled in this sort of gritty, testosterone-soaked, R-rated fare. Sandler, on the other hand, is squishy-soft in that unmistakable Hollywood manner - watching him in this PG-13 piffle, he looks less like an a-hole athlete who could tough it out in a Texas prison than an eager-to-please Improv regular who somehow ended up in a Universal Studios tour backlot simulation of a Texas prison.

Faithfulness to director Robert Aldrich's hard-hitting 1974 flick, in which Crewe leads a ragtag group of convicts in a football match against the sadistic guards, isn't the problem: Major plot points are kept intact, snatches of dialogue are lifted wholesale by scripter Sheldon Turner, and even characters' fates remain the same (including the unexpected murder of the most likable prisoner). But when this version does deviate from its source material, the results are disastrous.

The homophobia rampaging through this picture is astonishing - a patron can't get through one fistful of popcorn without being subjected to yet another gay-bashing gag (the nadir is arguably Sandler's buddy, the insufferable Rob Schneider, making his token cameo appearance as an inmate trying to orchestrate a group hug in the showers). I don't know if Sandler was repeatedly sodomized in the locker room during his high school years, but he clearly has issues to work through. Or maybe it's just his infantile strain of humor taking over as it did in his earlier pictures. (The elderly and the overweight also take plenty of solid licks.) Insult comedy can be uproarious in the right hands (Mel Brooks, the Farrelly Brothers), but here it's merely witless, the cinematic equivalent of the school bully giving a weaker classmate a wedgie and then declaring himself the epitome of fine-honed drollery.

CINDERELLA MAN Ron Howard can finally breathe easy.

No filmmaker in his right mind would want his boxing picture to be released a scant few months after Million Dollar Baby cleaned up at the Oscars and at the box office. But Cinderella Man is so structurally and tonally different from Clint Eastwood's masterwork that it might as well be about jai alai, considering how little the two films will be compared to each other.

Not that Cinderella Man would completely suffer from such a contrast: This one never touches greatness like Clint's Baby, but it's a sturdy film on its own terms. It relates the real-life story of pugilist James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe), a once-successful boxer whose career took a nose dive about the same time as the stock market at the onset of the Great Depression. Considered past his prime and barely able to provide for his wife (Renee Zellweger) and kids by snagging occasional work on the docks, Braddock finds himself on an unlikely comeback trail as a one-time gig inside the ring turns into a late-career flourishing.

Almost every summer has at least one tony Oscar-bait production geared toward discerning audiences, movies that can generally be spotted by their immaculate production values, award-laden casts and literate screenplays (The Road to Perdition, Seabiscuit, Garfield: The Movie - hey, how'd that last one slip in there?). Cinderella Man fills that designation nicely. Crowe's touching portrayal is instrumental in recruiting the audience's sympathies from the get-go (and look for excellent support by Sideways' Paul Giamatti as Braddock's manager-friend), and Howard and his A Beautiful Mind writer Akiva Goldsman take care to spend as much time detailing the ravages of the Depression as they do Braddock's return to the ring. Cinderella Man may not break new ground, but in its ability to provide old-fashioned entertainment, the gloves come flying off.??