THE CREW (Touchstone) Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, Seymour Cassel, Carrie-Anne Moss, Jennifer Tilly, Lainie Kazan, Jeremy Piven. Screenplay: Barry Fanaro. Producers: Barry Sonnenfeld and Barry Josephson. Director: Michael Dinner. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, profanity, sexual situations, brief nudity) Running Time: 88 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Some concepts are funny on paper, even if there's no way they could ever be classic comedies in reality. THE CREW has such a concept. Is it funny envisioning a quartet of aging mob tough guys trying to regain their swagger in their sunset years? Sure it is. There have been other comedies about seniors turning to a life of crime rather than going gentle into that good night, like the 1979 George Burns/Art Carney/Lee Strassburg vehicle GOING IN STYLE, but a wiseguy twist sounds promising. It may not be chock-a-block with rapier-sharp witticisms, and there may be a prostate gag or two to wade through, but there should be a few laughs, right? There's only so much you can do to screw up a solid concept. Right?
In fact, THE CREW screws up its solid concept so badly, and in so many provocative variations, that it's practically a road map for misbegotten film-making. The four aging Mafiosi -- Bobby Bartellemeo (Richard Dreyfuss), Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds), Mike "The Brick" Donatelli (Dan Hedaya) and Tony "Mouth" Donato (Seymour Cassel) -- are residents of a Miami retirement hotel that's about to become the latest victim of South Beach gentrification. Faced with the prospect of a skyrocketing rent for their newly-chic digs, the boys decide to make their home a less appealing place to live by setting it up to look like a gangland murder has taken place there (though the body they use is already dead). The fake hit has the desired effect of scaring off prospective tenants, but there's an unfortunate side effect: The dead body whose head they blew off was the father of a drug lord (Miguel Sandoval), who's determined to wreak vengeance on the responsible parties.
Ah, the wacky complications that are possible with the inclusion of a pissed-off drug lord. And imagine how many more wacky complications are possible when you include a sub-plot involving a Miami detective (Carrie-Anne Moss) trying to fend off the advances of her colleague and philandering ex-boyfriend (Jeremy Piven). And still yet even how many more wacky complications are possible when a stripper (Jennifer Tilly, who's beginning to resemble Divine above the neck) learns of the boys' involvement in the fake killing, and blackmails them into killing her delicatessen heiress stepmother (Lainie Kazan in full "oy gevalt" mode), but the boys only kidnap her and fake her death instead, only in so doing they manage to piss off the drug lord even further? Can you feel your sides splitting at the crazy goofy hilarity? And can you feel a tear trickling down your cheek because Bobby is really a sensitive guy, searching high and low for the daughter he hasn't seen in 30 years?
The reason THE CREW stinks -- or at least the main reason -- is that it's not about what it's about. A movie about geriatric mobsters could be funny. You could have them interact with their modern counterparts to show them how it's done old school, like a Scorsese version of SPACE COWBOYS, or focus on what kind of rackets they could run in their senior-heavy milieu. There's good character stuff there, too -- what happens when you're left to fossilize after once being part of a culture of macho action?
But THE CREW isn't about any of that. It isn't about anything, really, because there's so much garbage thrown into 88 minutes of script that it never develops anything remotely resembling comic momentum. The personalities of the four principles are inanely simplistic, leaving the actors to overact madly in compensation (Reynolds in particular is wretched beyond all description). Director Michael Dinner, meanwhile, over-directs madly in compensation, operating under the delusion that you can somehow make a terrible script funny by filming everyone in fish-eye close-up. Even the editing chops gags into such minute shreds that set-ups are separated from their punch lines. Something this fundamentally incompetent should carry a government warning sticker.
There are exactly two moments in THE CREW when the experience of watching it is remotely tolerable. One involves a silly homage to GOODFELLAS, with our protagonists strutting through the kitchen of a buffet restaurant after paying off a busboy. The other involves Sandoval's drug lord growing frustrated at dealing with his incompetent underlings. For the other 84 minutes, THE CREW isn't simply unfunny; it's a test of an audience's good will, practically an exercise in making every wrong narrative, performance or technical choice possible. It's a good pitch turned into a terrible script turned into a godawful film. Actual humor from a solid concept? Fuggeddaboutit.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 badfellas: 1.
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