This incredibly tacky British remake of Robert Aldrich's 1974 American prison drama, The Longest Yard, stars Vinnie Jones as an England football captain convicted of drink-driving and GBH and sent to a tough jail where the screws are descendants of the Nazis, the governor is on the take and in hock to a bookmaker threatening to blow up his Saab and the only glamour around is a blonde in reception with a pig ring in her nostril.
Vinnie, though, apparently doesn't do sex scenes. What he does is bareknuckle, head-butting ones with the institution's star psycho ("22 men with his bare hands") and what he does best is train a team of paunchy inmates who are taught 26 methods of fouling their opponents when they take on the warders. It all seems like an unvarnished report on the state of English soccer today - or indeed the state of British cinema, reduced to the lowest common (and very common it is) denominator of laddish, loutish thuggery.
Vinnie's great Easter Island face still relies on a single look conveying one emotion - threat - which he produces for every occasion. But then Mean Machine doesn't ask much else of him. David Hemmings must really attend to his spiky eyebrows: they make him look like a panto demon.
Mean Machine
Cert: cert15
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