Mean Machine is a 2001 British sports comedy film directed by Barry Skolnick and starring former footballer Vinnie Jones. The film is an adaptation of the 1974 American film The Longest Yard, featuring association football rather than American football.
Plot
Danny "The Mean Machine" Meehan (Vinnie Jones) is a retired footballer and former captain of England, who was banned from football for life for fixing an unspecified match they played against Germany. In the present day, after a long drinking session, he drives recklessly to a local bar, where he is pursued by police. Inside the bar, when asked to take a breathalyser test, he attacks two police officers and is arrested; he is later convicted and sentenced to three years in Longmarsh prison.
Once inside, his status as a celebrity immediately puts him at odds with the guards, who brutally beat him soon after arrival. The prison governor, then pulls strings to ensure Meehan serves his sentence in Longmarsh, as the head coach of the prison wardens' football team. However, Meehan declines, and instead trains a team of other convicts, to play against the wardens.
Meehan is met with an unwelcome reception from his cellmates, Raj, Jerome and Trojan. Outside, Danny meets and befriends an elderly convict, Doc, who teaches him how to survive in prison. While cleaning the yards with Doc, Meehan is introduced to Sykes, a gangster and one of the most respected inmates in the prison. Sykes also shows aggression towards Meehan, revealing he lost a large amount of money betting on the England game he had fixed. Later in the prison cafeteria, Meehan makes another ally, meeting the prison's fast-talking contraband dealer "Massive".
Danny and Massive begin the recruitment process for his team, but struggle, as many of the inmates are reluctant to join due to both Sykes' influence over the prison and their hatred for Meehan as a cheat. As Danny tries and fails to form a team, Massive is playing football in a prison hallway, when a racist guard approaches him and assaults him as the other inmates watch in horror. Meehan lunges at the guard and protects Massive from further beating, earning the respect of many of the other inmates. His team includes a violent maximum-security inmate named "The Monk". Meanwhile, the warden gets himself into trouble with "Barry the Bookie," an unlicensed bookmaker who was recommended to him by Sykes. After being threatened on the phone by Barry, the warden decides to try to make back the money he owes by betting on the prison guards' team.
A psychotic inmate named Nitro accuses him of being a snitch, Danny gets ambushed in the showers threatened, but refuses to tell, earning the trust of both Sykes' men and Sykes himself. To win lost money back, Sykes bribes Meehan all is forgiven if his team wins. Angry that his plan to have Danny killed failed, Nitro, a bomb expert, offers to have Meehan killed in exchange for a transfer to a lower security prison which one of the guards, Ratchett, agrees to. Nitro crafts a bomb in his cell and places it in Danny's locker. Danny and the rest of the team are going over tactics in one of the cells, when Doc arrives at the cell and is killed by the bomb. Nitro is subsequently sent to another facility, but not to the minimum-security prison he was promised, but to a mental health facility.
The match commences shortly after Doc's death. At half time, the inmates' team is winning 1–0, and the morale is high until the governor attempts to blackmail Meehan, accusing him of being an accessory to Doc's murder and threatening to sentence him to 20 years unless he throws the match. At first he puts his own interests before that of the team's, deliberately playing poorly and faking injury to be taken off the pitch. As the final moments of the game tick down, he redeems himself, bravely using a square-ball to fellow inmate 'Billy the Limpet' to win the game for the cons. Afterward, the Captain of the Guards, Burton, refuses to co-operate with the governor's attempts to get revenge on Danny, instead congratulating him on the win. The governor's vehicle explodes, and Sykes informs him that he, and Barry the Bookie, will retaliate if he tries anything. A victorious Danny and Massive walk triumphantly across the pitch.