Mean Machine

I love[d] being a college movie reviewer. Love[d] it, love[d] it, love[d] it.

Let's say it wasn't just Maryland vs. Duke, with their unfounded sense of their own superiority against our unfailing courage, heart and guile. Let's say Duke had actually managed to imprison the Maryland players, and that Jason [now Jay] Williams and Mike Dunleavy took advantage of their entirely undeserved position to inflict brutal beatings on our boys. And let's say Mike Krzyzewski was just as duplicitous as the difference between his name's spelling and pronounciation implies, and decided to let the Terp prisoners play a game against their Blue Devil captors, to help the Dookies tune up for the rest of the ACC - except that the Terps are told to lose, or Krzyzewski will extend their jail sentences. What would our men do?

If you just got up out of your seat and screamed, "We'd kick their asses, that's what we'd do!", you'll probably enjoy the new film "Mean Machine." This film is actually a remake of Robert Aldrich's 1974 manly comedy classic "The Longest Yard," about a group of convicts led by Burt Reynolds who take it to their sadistic guards on the gridiron. However, given that "Mean Machine" hails from the greatest of Britains, this movie concerns not football but...well, football, to hear them tell it. Soccer, to us.

Of course, the course of the plot could be predicted by a ten-year-old, the emotions occasionally expressed are paper-thin, and it's hard to imagine that any jail has that many good soccer players, even in England. These defects are standard for this sort of movie, and they can be cheerfully disregarded. A more serious problem is this movie's initial confusion about whether it is funny or serious, a confusion which threatens to derail the entire film.

But director Barry Skolnik has a bunch of things going for him that overcome all those disadvantages: a supercharged soundtrack that convincingly recreates the bass-heavy atmosphere of any good stadium, a flair for the hilarious physical comedy that comes from people getting pounded on the field of play, a script by Joe Screenwriter that spends the last half of the movie solely on that field, and, most importantly, Vinnie Jones.

Jones entered the international limelight with his amazingly manly performances under Guy Ritchie's direction in "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and "Snatch," but he was previously known to Englishmen as a soccer star. Here he plays Danny "Mean Machine" Meehan, a former soccer star who goes to jail for drunken assault. Once he's there, he must rediscover both his skills and his inner man in completing the above-mentioned mission. However, to the audience, neither is ever really in question. After a few setups to show that Meehan has become a thorough degenerate, Jones blazes through his role; even his occasional uncertainty, as demanded by the script, feels like the hardest-hitting uncertainty ever. His dilemmas over how to build the team and what to do once it's built may drive the plot, but his charisma drives the movie.

Of course, soccer is a team sport, and "Mean Machine" has some people in it besides Jones. Among the usual rogue's gallery of chuckle-inducing misfits and hilarious stereotypes, a few stand out. David Hemmings scowls marvelously as the conniving, venal prison warden, his odd devil-eyebrows a big, unsubtle asset here. Vas Blackwood is a smiling schemer as the ironically named Massive, and an effective foil for and aid to Jones' determination. Sally Phillips should be mentioned for her role as the most obviously superfluous female ever, secretary Tracey, who exists only to give the cameraman a break from shooting all these tough-guy mugs. And Jason Statham as the insane, physically gifted serial killer Monk displays a convincing wild-eyed ferocity.

But none of this matters without convincing direction, to bring out both the action and the comedy in the action-comedy. Skolnik displays a sure hand on the football field, which is the most rousing section of the film, giving us humorous bone-crnching hits aplenty. But he has trouble stitching together the laughs and laments that alternate for much of the exposition and development. Three screenwriters contributed to the mishmash, and the result, for much of the first half of the film, is a directionless swamp, like when Mariah Carey sings the national anthem. The tragedy doesn't register because the film keeps wanting to be an action-comedy, and the action-comedy has trouble breaking out in full through all these pointless, unconvincing detours.

Still, when "Mean Machine" finally throws off the shackles of its aspirations, it delivers hellafied entertainment. Though you may find the first part of the film as sadistic as the amazingly violent guards, by the end of "Mean Machine," you'll be cheering for Jones and company to beat the hell out of them.

And them, and them, and them! Yeah!

EVERYBODY DISAGREES WITH ME YET AGAIN

I was just thinking the other day, "Wow, I haven't had a movie that I liked but that everyone else disparaged freely lately." Now, with "Mean Machine," that streak is over. The problem has its two usual prongs:

• When faced with mindless entertainment, most critics prefer to focus on "mindless," while I prefer to focus on "entertainment";
• I am much more sympathetic to people's efforts to be funny than most movie critics, particularly if those efforts involve people (okay, men) getting bonked on the head or kicked in the groin.

So caveat emptor, but I liked the movie a lot, Duke-baiting aside. (Though can you really ever set Duke-baiting aside? It's the staff of sports-watching life for me from December through the beginning of April. That's a long time, every year. And despite the appearance that I just put that crap in to satisfy my occasional longing to become a sports columnist and make snarky comments about teams I don't like for a living, it really was the best way to deploy the plot exposition - at the University of Maryland in March 2002. Know your audience, that's my motto!)

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