quiet; ‘Yard’ a hoot.His rage shtick played out, the star uses a team approach to make the remake a winner

Sometime after “PunchDrunk Love,” but not before “Mr. Deeds,” possibly between takes on “Anger Management,” someone slipped Adam Sandler a chill pill. Long known for playing bellowing, red-faced ninnies, the actor has struck an altogether mellower chord in his recent roles: the lovelorn vet in “50 First Dates,” the cuckolded chef in “Spanglish.

Once again, it’s the fact that Sandler doesn’t fly off the handle -- despite getting beaten around like a bowl of egg whites -- that makes his performance in “The Longest Yard” so coolly un-Sandlerish. As Paul Crewe, a disgraced ex-NFL quarterback who looks for gridiron redemption in the prison yard, the former “Saturday Night Live” funnyman is kicked in the sternum, billy-clubbed in the gut, cracked over the skull and shoved face-first into a basketball pole. Adding the proverbial insult to injury, he also gets propositioned by a transsexual cheerleader.

Any of these indignities would have spun the old Sandler into a cyclone of rage and Bob Barker abuse.

But not Crewe. He suffers them with weary eyes and a resigned grin, as if to say: “Yeah, I made ‘Little Nicky.’ Maybe I deserve it.” And he does, which admittedly is part of the fun.

Somewhat surprisingly, fun is never in short supply in “The Longest Yard,” a cameo-studded anabolic romp that’s zanier -- and perhaps funnier -- than the 1974 original. As Crewe, Sandler isn’t technically paying penance for bad movies, but for a point-shaving scandal that prematurely ended the quarterback’s career. Now a kept man with a snotty, demanding girlfriend (Courteney Cox) and a poisoned conscience, Crewe leads the police on a drunken car chase one night and earns himself a three-year ticket to Allenville prison, smack-dab in the middle of Texas football country.

Immediately pegged as a cheat and a loser by his fellow incarcerinos, Crewe strikes a deal with the prim, conniving warden (James Cromwell) to put together an all-inmate football squad to scrimmage against the prison guards, a mean, muscular bunch who compete in a semi-pro prison league. Though Crewe gets only a motley handful of volunteers -- including a manic klutz (Nicolas Turturro) and bleachers-benching simpleton (pro wrestler Bob Sapp) -- he soon persuades the prison yard studs (including one played by hip-hop star Nelly) to join the team, using their hatred of authority as a crude but effective sort of recruiting tool.

Misfits coming together to beat the odds isn’t the freshest premise in the galley, but director Peter Segal -- who previously displayed a knack for bringing out Sandler’s likable side in “50 First Dates” -- hides the gamy flavor behind an amusing confit of brio and brawn. Hilariously, he deploys his beefed-up supporting cast (including pro wrestlers Goldberg and Steve Austin) like human special effects, making both mockery and spectacle of their freakish physiques. As a mute mountain of an inmate named Turley, 7-foot, 400-pound Indian martial arts star Dalip Singh is like the glandular second coming of late actor Richard Kiel, who played the character in the original.

Speaking of the original, the man who starred in it, Burt Reynolds, makes a nostalgic if essentially pointless return as a pigskin old-timer who helps Crewe shape the team into greatness. Football enthusiasts will also recognize former Oakland Raiders enforcer Bill Romanowski and one-time Dallas Cowboys wideout Michael Irvin in cameos.

“The Longest Yard” could represent the rarest of cinematic phenomena: A comedy remake that actually out-humors the original. The suddenly ubiquitous Chris Rock, as Allenville’s wiseacre black-market supply man Caretaker, makes that happen by himself, popping off with his usual scabrous, insouciant wit.

When Crewe pooh-poohs one of Allenville’s cross-dressing “girls” (Tracy Morgan from “Saturday Night Live”), Rock’s response is wickedly un-P.C.: “He looks ugly now, but in eight months, he’ll look like Beyoncé.”

Granted, Sandler is an iffy substitute for Reynolds in terms of laid-back leading-man charisma, but he’s not bad. Some may find him blander than usual -- one critic I know used to admire his “unstifled Everyman rage” -- but it was a necessary sacrifice; the rage thing reached its apotheosis in “Punch-Drunk Love”; afterward, the joke rang hollow. So now, like a good option quarterback, he pitches to his co-stars and does a little more handing off. Blander? Perhaps, but it makes for a better overall team effort.

‘The Longest Yard’

Stars: Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Burt Reynolds, Michael Irvin, William Fichtner

Behind the scenes: Directed by Peter Segal, from a script by Sheldon Turner

Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, violence, language and drug references

Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Grade: B