Bovie Movie

Adam Sandler teams up for the third time with director Peter Segal for this remake of the 1974 Burt Reynolds comedy, The Mean Machine. Sandler plays a washed-up football star who ends up in jail after a night of drinking and a car chase through downtown Los Angeles. Prison warden James Cromwell asks Sandler to train a group of convicts to play against the guards’ team for a warm-up match but, encouraged by motormouth Chris Rock, the failed player sets his sights on winning the game. Lazy, deeply predictable but warmly humorous, this avoids complex characterisation in favour of well-worn clichés — sadistic guards, brutes who just want to be loved, the inevitable spell in solitary confinement — as motivation for the underdog team. The sports section of the movie, in which all that sadism is avenged, is far more successful due to tight choreography of the game and the pleasure of seeing bullies punished. Ultimately, your enjoyment will depend on how exciting you find slow-motion shots of sweaty hulks smashing into one another and how many rallying speeches, accompanied by obligatory orchestral swells, your stomach can take. 

There are more laughs than you might expect in this light-hearted vehicle for the normally dire David Spade. He plays Dickie Roberts, the washed-up former child star who, having missed his real-life childhood, is unable to generate the emotion necessary to clinch a possible movie comeback. To solve the problem, he moves in with an all-American family who, with grim Hollywood inevitability, at first resent his presence then warm to his oddball personality. The screenplay degenerates into schmaltz occasionally — and there’s a pseudo-Oedipal strand to the story that will strike some as subversive and others as plain weird — but Spade creates an unusual character who, despite being self-obsessed, is oddly vulnerable and likeable. If none of that appeals, you can always spend your time spotting the numerous cameo appearances by genuine former child stars (the end credits feature a fantastically gruesome massed choir of them).