WITLESS PROTECTION PROGRAM
THE CREW
Directed by Michael Diner
Screenplay by Barry Fanaro
With Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds
(THEATER) PG-13 88 min.
What is it with all these movies about four old guys? Has someone made off with the SAG pension fund? Space CowboysB8 a yarn with wit and = style and four old geezers recapturing their youth, is still live meat in theaters. Now along creaks The Crew, which has everything but the wit and the style.
The cut-rate oldsters here are Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, and Seymour Cassell, and they're not astronauts, they're retired wise guys. As far as we can tell they've been inseparable since they were young wise guys, which does make you wonder a little. They're all living together in the South Beach section of Miami (think of them as Beach Cowboys) rocking away their dotage (Dreyfuss is all of 53, but the mob must have a generous retirement plan) on the front porch of the Raj Mahal, a seedy waterfront apartment building, when a rent hike forces them into action. They rub out a corpse in front of the building to give the appearance of a mob hit and cause a scandal that will force down property values. A Colombian drug lord and the Miami cops get involved. So does a hooker (Jennifer Tilly) and her stepmother (Lainie Kazan).
That's more plot than you need to know. There's a contrived tug-at-the-heartstrings subplot involving Drefuss's long-lost daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss). What there isn't is the substance and character and inventiveness that comedy needs to work. It really is not enough having Reynolds doing his bad-boy leer at sexy babes or asking Dreyfuss, a very good but not very Italian actor, to say "that dumb scavoots" or, god help us, "fuhgeddaboudit." Hugh Grant did it more convincingly in Mickey Blue Eyes. These actors have all been good, but here they provide an object lesson in the importance of script and director to the film process.
This is one of those movies where the creative team began a lot of brainstorming sentences with the word "see." As in "See, we got these four old mobsters.." Or "See, the corpse turns out to be.." The idea is that we're so desperate for entertainment that we'll settle for manufactured plot, ersatz emotion, second-hand inspiration, and tired humor that can't work up the energy to appear effortless.
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