You've already seen this movie, even if you haven't seen the 1974 original (which, incidentally, I haven't seen either). If I were to describe to you the main characters and the situation in which they find themselves, you'd be able to guess the ending, as well as many of the plot points that crop up. This isn't always a problem; indeed, it needn't be, since there are dozens of good genre films that don't stray from their formulas. Instead of being creative with the generic devices, they concentrate on interesting characters or novel twists on what we've already seen. The problem with this film is twofold: it doesn't do enough with the characters, and it's just plain not funny enough. With a movie like this, only laughter can distract you from the pedestrian plot, and I didn't laugh nearly enough.

Suspension of disbelief is a given: if you can accept Adam Sandler as a former MVP quarterback who's incarcerated in a rural Texas prison where all the guards are white racist bodybuilders who play semi-pro football, you're halfway there. Sandler is Paul "Wrecking" Crewe, who was disgraced and booted from the NFL when he threw a game. After an opening-scene joyride in his girlfriend's Bentley, he ends up in the hands of the vicious Captain Knauer (a very good William Fichtner) and the equally sadistic Warden Hazen (James Cromwell). The warden wants Crewe to give his football team some pointers; Knauer doesn't want Crewe anywhere near the team. It's quickly worked out, though, that Crewe will put together a convict team to serve as tackling dummies for the guards. With the help of Caretaker (Chris Rock), he sets about recruiting, but all the best (=black) players distrust him because of his history of selling out to the highest bidder. Eventually he puts a team together, and with the help of a former Heisman Trophy winner (Burt Reynolds), they're ready to get even with the guards.

It all comes down to the big game, and you already know that it's going to end one of two ways: the convicts pull it together but lose a hard-fought game, thus earning the guards' respect, or they win in the last seconds of the game, thus earning the guards' respect. That predictablity isn't really a problem—how many new developments can you really add to a story like this? The problem is the dispiritingly workmanlike way the film goes about checking all the boxes on the Screenplay 101 checklist. Right in the proper order are all the required scenes: Crewe stands up to the guards, Crewe's initial recruits are a bunch of losers, and then Crewe earns the respect of the real atheletes. The warden gets worried, the team suffers a setback, Crewe rallies the guys, an important character dies because even comedies need a bit of tragedy to provide focus, and Crewe rallies the guys again. You get the picture. All of these scenes are there, and if you look closely enough you can see through to the preprinted paint-by-numbers sheet underneath. I kept thinking of Mystery, Alaska, another sports movie that followed the same script.

A lot of the humor is provided by physical oddities: there's the enormous, dim-witted black guy (Bob Sapp) who speaks in aw-shucks-massa dialect; there's the enormous, dim-witted Indian guy (Dalip Singh) who likes to play ping-pong. There's a bevy of "transvestites" who reminded me strongly of when Damon Wayans used to play gay characters on "In Living Color." And there's Cheesburger Eddy (Terry Crewes), who may very well be the most annoyingly overt product placement in the history of movies: he's a walking, talking, rhyming ad for McDonald's. But I didn't really laugh. The biggest laugh was a throwaway: Caretaker advises Crewe to convince some black players to play because "you can't have a bunch of white guys and one brotha out there—this ain't hockey!" I chuckled sometimes, I smiled at other points, but I spent most of the time waiting for the laughs.

With a movie like this, if it draws you in, you stop noticing niggling flaws and petty annoyances, but when you're left out, they stick out at you like, well, like Adam Sandler playing a pro quarterback. The music especially annoyed me: it's a grab-bag of classic rock songs and newer rap songs, and so many of them didn't fit that I wondered whether they had really thought any of it out. CCR's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" and Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" were the two most glaring examples. The fact that every single guard was a white racist steroid freak also bugged me; too much of the tension in the film was artificial and racially motivated, which comes off as a little odd, given that the main character is white. It's as if the filmmakers didn't think that sadistic steroid freak guards were enough to make us hate them, or enough to convince us that our heroes would hate them too.

The film is populated by professional wrestlers, current and former football players, and the rapper Nelly, who is probably the most likeable guy in the film. Also earning good marks is Brian Bosworth as a guard who is given estrogen to quiet his Balco-bred agression; other people I should have recognized but didn't are Bill Romanowski (football), Kevin Nash (wrestling), Bill Goldberg (wrestling), and Steve Austin (wrestling).

I really like Adam Sandler. I think he can be a very effective actor in his comedies; Happy Gilmore is one of my favorite comedies, mostly because he's so endearing in it. I also think he has a heck of a lot of potential in more serious films, such as Punch-Drunk Love. Perhaps I'm being too hard on him, but I don't know what he was doing in this film. He wasn't his usual passive-aggressive nut character, but he wasn't noticeably anything else either. He seemed a tad lost, and so did the film.