Z/Web

This is a remake of The Longest Yard (which I’ve never seen), except that instead of American football in an American prison, this is soccer (real football) in an English prison. Basically, the former English team captain gets drunk and assaults an officer and gets thrown in jail. There, he’s recruited by the warden to coach the guards’ football team. Instead, he proposes to coach a team of inmates against the guards’ team. Of course others don’t like this, and he must earn the respect of his fellow inmates before they’ll trust him. All this leads to a climatic soccer match. Decently done, but unfortunately the premise makes it predictable, and the whole “will he throw the match” suspense at the end was pointless, since we knew he wouldn’t (audiences would never have forgiven the filmmakers for doing that). I liked the soccer references, though I suppose some Americans wouldn’t get them (like one of the guards telling a group of prisoners they’d just gotten a “yellow card” — in soccer, that’s a caution, or warning). Though the DVD does include American and British versions on it (I watched the British). At least I understood this one: if The Longest Yard included a lot of American football strategy and jargon, I probably wouldn’t have understood it.