More Work For Burt

If you thought that a film's shelf-life could be summarily ended by a remake starring Vinnie Jones then, in this case at least, you'd be dead wrong. Burt Reynolds' 1974 footie flick, The Longest Yard (that's American football to you), is still on track for a second run and director Peter Segal has convinced Reynolds himself to join the team. The 50 First Dates director has placed Adam Sandler in Reynolds' original role as an incarcerated ex-football star who is coerced into forming a team of inmates and facing off against the prison guards' line-up. Reynolds has agreed to star as the convicts' coach, lending his endorsement to the remake in much the way that Michael Caine did for (shudder) Stephen Kay's Get Carter. If you didn't catch the 1974 original, you may have crossed paths with Blighty's take on proceedings: the surprisingly watchable Mean Machine. Sure, the part was hardly a stretch for Vinnie Jones (former pro-footie star accused of general thuggery) and Jason Statham's turn as a Scottish sociopath called The Monk was faintly embarrassing, but it wasn't a bad little kick-about. Segal's film brings everything back to American soil (and sports) and the fact that he's cast Chris Rock and Snoop Doog to cover Sandler's wings should give you a fair old hint that he's not planning to go the serious route with this one. On a side-note, Empire would like to assure all our readers that, despite any claims to the contrary, the longest yard will always be 91.4 centimetres.