Nearly four decades after its release, The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds remains the gold standard for football comedies, which is odd because no one, and I mean no one, quotes lines from that movie. Unlike the great film comedies made about other sports—Major League, Slap Shot, Caddyshack, heck, even Kingpin—The Longest Yard is just not eminently quotable. You might say that has something to do with its age, and yet the movie came out the same year (1974) as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and people quote from those movies all the time.
Is The Longest Yard simply not as funny as those movies? Yeah, that’s basically the long and the short of it. While the story about a bunch of convicts who band together to play a football game against the guards has a compelling theme of redemption, its earnestness eclipses its comedic value. A great movie? Undoubtedly. A great football comedy? Well, considering how thin the field is— The Waterboy and what else?—then yeah, it’s definitely great. With any luck, it’ll soon be joined by an upcoming project starring Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, and Alec Baldwin, about two rival families who traditionally play a contentious pickup football game on Thanksgiving.
(That short summation alone engenders confidence in the comedic possibilities.)
The project is tentatively titled Three Mississippi, and given its detailed description by executive producer Adam McKay, who along with Ferrell created the website Funny or Die, this movie seems fated for classic, quotable status. Here’s what McKay told Entertainment Weekly:
It’s about these two rival families from … we’re thinking Philadelphia but we need to check in with Wahlberg and Ferrell and see what kind of accents they want to do. [Laughs] Alec Baldwin is the patriarch of one of the families, and Wahlberg is his son. He saw the Kennedys playing football on their front lawn at Thanksgiving, and boom, that’s it: “Anything the Kennedys do, we’re doing.” His family starts playing the other family that lives across the park from them. Over the years, Baldwin’s family hasn’t done too well—they own a crappy little bar in town—while the other family, which Will’s character eventually becomes the patriarch of, becomes really successful. The game gets nastier and nastier as the years go on, and Ferrell’s family starts just destroying the other family. After a massive heart attack, Baldwin’s character’s dying wish is that his estranged son, Mark, take over the game and finally win one. So Wahlberg has to put this ramshackle, convict, gambling-addict family back together again and beat the richies. The whole spirit of it is that it’s just a giant, fun ensemble comedy. We want to populate it with people we love. There’s a funny subplot with Rob Riggle where he’s a gay cousin that Wahlberg’s family sort of turned their backs on but he played football at Fresno State and they need him. We’re going to try to get Jeremy Renner to play an ex-con. The idea is to bring in, like, 15 people that we love and just do a big, funny holiday movie.
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Now why didn’t I think of this idea?
The failure of Hollywood to make successful comedies about football, America’s favorite sport, is somewhat baffling. But perhaps the biggest obstacle has been the consistent focus on professional football (The Replacements) or even high-stakes college football (The Waterboy). By necessity plot lines that tackle these subjects need an overarching tension between authority (coaches and the conservative way that things are usually done) and the nameless, faceless players who come through the system and are patently replaceable. But when you make the action revolve around a pickup Thanksgiving football game between two rival families, well, the field opens up considerably.
The story that McKay describes above might tap some familiar Hollywood tropes, including a father with a dying wish, the Prodigal Son, and a fractured family reuniting to achieve something together—but these elements have never been put together in a football comedy. Least of all one starring Ferrell, Wahlberg, and Baldwin.
The NFL lockout is boring and repetitive, and when it’s over no one will care to revisit its tired storyline of billionaires versus millionaires. But the storyline of Three Mississippi? Yeah, we’ll hopefully be quoting this one for years.
You forgot THE BEST OF TIMES with Kurt Russell and Robin Williams, which is a pretty funny movie. In fact, the plotline for the Ferrell movie is somewhat similar; rather than the poor family trying to finally beat the rich, it’s a poor town replaying a game against their rich rivals.