Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Wyatt There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

kenjha Inmates take on the guards in a football game at a prison. In the opening scene it is established that Reynolds is an arrogant and misogynistic ex pro football player. And he's supposed to be the good guy. The film is supposed to be a comedy but any attempts at humor fall flat. The script and direction are both inept. There's a football game that takes up about 45 minutes of the film and it's clichéd and poorly executed, with random and distracting use of split screen. The final drive by the convicts doesn't even make sense, as Reynolds purposely garners unsportsmanlike penalties on two consecutive plays while trying to win the game.

jts0405 The Longest Yard was an extremely well put together movie about prison and football all at the same time. I thought that this would be an all sport styled movie basing on the game of football, but it was more than all of that. It had the drama/comedy/sport genres all tied into one definitive movie. Burt Reynolds did fairly well for this kind of movie, as you normally see him doing Smokey and the Bandit movies which base around a huge car chase throughout the entire movie. So with this step up he really gives an all out entertaining performance as Paul Crewe and the characters really make the movie in a special way.10/10

Spikeopath Disgraced former pro football quarterback Paul Crewe is sent to prison after a drunken night to remember. The prison is run by Warden Hazen, a football nut who spies an opportunity to utilise Crewe's ability at the sport to enhance the prison guards team skills. After initially declining to help, Crewe is swayed into putting together a team of convicts to take on the guards in a one off match, thieves, murderers and psychopaths collectively come together to literally, beat the guards, but Crewe also has his own personal demons to exorcise.This violent, but wonderfully funny film has many things going for it. Directed with style by the gifted hands of Robert Aldrich, The Longest Yard cheekily examines the harshness of gridiron and fuses it with the brutality of the penal system. The script from Tracy Keenan Wynn is a sharp as a tack and Aldrich's use of split screens and slow motion sequences bring it all together very nicely indeed. I would also like to comment on the editing from Michael Luciano, nominated for the Oscar in that department, it didn't win, but in my honest opinion it's one of the best edited pictures from the 70s.Taking the lead role of Crewe is Burt Reynolds, here he is at the peak of his powers (perhaps never better) and has star appeal positively bristling from every hair on his rugged chest. It's a great performance, believable in the action sequences (he was once a halfback for Florida), and crucially having the comic ability to make Wynn's script deliver the necessary mirth quota. What is of most interest to me is that Crewe is a less than honourable guy, the first 15 minutes of the film gives us all we need to know about his make up, but much like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest the following year, The Longest Yard has us rooting for the main protagonist entering the home straight, and that is something of a testament to Reynolds' charm and charisma.The film's crowning glory is the football game itself, taking up three parts of an hour, the highest compliment I can give it is to say that one doesn't need to be a fan of the sport to enjoy this final third. It's highly engaging as a comedy piece whilst also being octane inventive as an action junkie's series of events. A number of former gridiron stars fill out both sides of the teams to instill a high believability factor into the match itself, and the ending is a pure rewarding punch the air piece of cinema. 9/10

robmeister When I heard that Adam Sandler was coming out with a remake of this movie, I nearly winced. Not necessarily because I'm not the biggest Sandler fan, but because this movie is a classic in the sports film genre, and you don't mess with a good thing. Later, I found out that Burt Reynolds co-starred in the remake, so I figured it might be worth a shot. With that in mind, I rented the original and watched it again.My first reaction was "So THIS is where that Skynyrd song came from!" (I'm kidding, of course). Burt Reynolds (himself, a former college football player) stars as Paul "Wrecking" Crewe, a disgraced quarterback who got into trouble in a points-shaving scandal some years back. The movie starts at the peak of his contempt, where, in a drunken rage, he assaults his wife, steals her car, dumps it into a bay, then tries to beat up the cops who arrest him (and this is all during the opening credits!).The real story takes place when Crewe is sent to prison, where the warden (Eddie Albert) has a singular obsession with football, to the point that he manipulates Crewe into assembling a team among the inmates for an exhibition game against the guards.Now, if I go any further, I will be forced to send up a spoiler alert. What I can say is this film launched (or re-launched) the careers of Bernadette Peters, Michael Conrad (of "Hill Street Blues" fame), Richard Kiel (who plays Jaws in two James Bond films), and Ed Lauter, who went on to have a prolific career as a character actor (including an appearance in the Sandler remake of this movie).Some of the scenes seemed stilted here, and some of it was racially-biased (but this was Florida in 1974 -- They hadn't quite grown up yet), but much of the film holds up. By the way, the editing of the football game itself is among the best I have seen in film, and it undoubtedly was the source of inspiration of how the TV show "24" is presented.ESPN calls it "the best sports movie, period", and there are many arguments in that favor. As for me, I'll take "Field of Dreams", but this comes in at #2.