THE CREW
Review by John Beachem
* * *
Directed by: Michael Dinner Written by: Barry Fanaro
Bobby Bartellemeo (Richard Dreyfuss), Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds), Mike the Brick (Dan Hedaya), and Tony "The Mouth" Donato (Seymour Cassel) are a bunch of wise guys. You know the type, these guys used to break things for gangsters back in the forties because they were too stupid to run their own gang. The problem is, now it's the nineties and they're still wise guys; they're just too old and feeble to break things. The group lives in the Raj Mahal Hotel in Florida, the last place the old folks have. The landlord has decided to raise the rent so the old people will leave and he can bring in the new, young clientele. So the wiseguys decide to take a corpse from the morgue (where The Brick works), shoot it, and place it in the hotel so the young people will stay away and the rents will drop. The problem is, being the numb skulls these guys are, they shoot the body of a Cuban drug lord's (Miguel Sandoval) father. The drug lord thinks his father was still alive when the wise guys shot him, so he starts trying to track them down. Thrown into the mix are a stripper, named Ferris (Jennifer Tilly), who wants her step-mother (Lainie Kazan) killed; Detective Olivia Neal (Carrie-Anne Moss), a cop who is slowly figuring the whole thing out; and Bartellemeo's search for his long-lost daughter, whose name just happens to be Olivia.
Mobster comedies seem to be quite popular in Hollywood these days. They've thrown us dreck like "Mickey Blue Eyes" as well as the occasional hilarious movie like "Analyze This". Then we get movies like Michael Dinner's (tv's "Chicago Hope") "The Crew". This is your typical August comedy; not all that funny, but not incredibly bad either (the really bad movies get saved for January and February). "The Crew" follows that trend of the past few years where two similar movies are released within a few weeks of each other ("Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" in '98, "Sixth Sense" and "Stir of Echoes" in '99). I'm not sure just why 2000 was chosen as the year of old guy movies ("Space Cowboys" anyone?), but who am I to argue with Hollywood. So, you're no doubt wondering if "The Crew" will make you laugh. Well, you'll no doubt chuckle quite a few times, but there isn't a single good belly laugh. The biggest problem with "The Crew", as compared to "Space Cowboys", is that the cast doesn't appear to be having all that much fun. In "Space Cowboys", the actors appeared giddy with excitement over what they were doing. In "The Crew" you'll want to check the cast members' pulses from time to time.
Richard Dreyfuss is used as the glue to hold our aging cast together, but Dreyfuss can't quite pull this task off. How can that be, you ask? Well, of all the cast members, Dreyfuss appears the most bored out of his mind at being in this movie (though it's still better than his last so-called comedy, "Krippendorf's Tribe"). Burt Reynolds delivers his usual display of ineptness at playing a comic role (or a dramatic role, or an action role, etc.), though he does get one great scene. Working in a Burger King, he gets one of those irritating customers who asks for a thousand and one special instructions on a hamburger. He leans forward and hisses: "I know what the commercials say, but special orders DO upset us." Dan Hedaya ("Clueless", "The Hurricane") can't help but be great in everything he appears in (even his brief appearance in "Alien: Resurrection" was good), and he's one of the only good things about "The Crew". While his cohorts sleepwalk their way through the film, Hedaya is having a grand-ol time playing the brainless Brick. Seymour Cassell, who was wonderful as Max Fischer's father in "Rushmore", isn't even given dialogue in "The Crew", so it's hard to blame the man for looking bored. Carrie-Anne Moss ("The Matrix") gives an adequate performance, but it's nothing special. Finally we have Miguel Sandoval ("Get Shorty") as the Latin druglord who knows he's a cliche (too bad Barry Fanaro didn't realize his movie was as well). Sandoval gets all the funniest moments (a scene where two bodies hang from the ceiling behind him while he gives a speech to his troops) and lines, and he delivers then with comic timing bordering on perfection. Too bad he's not on screen very often.
I complain and complain that the actors weren't having any fun with their script, but I truly can't blame them. Every old, cliched joke in the book is used in "The Crew". Granted, old and cliched jokes can be funny, but not when they're used repeatedly. Fanaro uses every joke till it's been ground into the dirt and then finally starts on a new one. The constant jokes about the characters having to go to the bathroom all the time get really old, really fast. I suppose the question you really have to ask yourself before going into "The Crew" is: how much do I like jokes about old people acting like old people? If those sorts of jokes are hysterical to you (for whatever bizarre reason), you'll have a great time. That's because there's no other kind of joke in "The Crew". We get traces of jokes about the Latin druglords, and one or two involving Carrie-Anne Moss and her ex-boyfriend (played by the incredibly irritating Jeremy Piven), but everything else is us laughing at people for being old. The elderly in my audience seemed to find many of these jokes hysterical. Most of the younger people just stared blankly at the screen.
A lot of the film's problems come from the fact that the jokes are all shoved in your face. I've always felt that a great comic film will feature jokes which occur in the background, or very quickly, so that only the careful watcher will notice them (The Dude filling out a check for a few cents in "The Big Lebowski" is a great example). In "The Crew", Michael Dinner leaves every joke lingering on screen in plain view till you just want to stand up and start shouting that you get it already (or maybe that's just me)! The other extreme is long, drawn out segments with no laughs. Under normal circumstances these types of scenes are present in a comedy to further the plot. In "The Crew" these scenes seem present because Barry Fanaro couldn't think of anything else to do. Let's face it, the film's plot isn't going to sustain much of a running time (which is probably why the movie only runs 88 minutes), but if Fanaro was going to throw filler into the mix, he could at least have made it funny filler. As for the soundtrack, well, it's not much to write home about. In fact, I honestly can't remember very much of it. I'd recommend "The Crew" to people who think old guys lusting after young women (a fairly major part of this movie) is funny and give it a slightly generous three out of five stars.
Comments? Send to: johnbeachem@dependentfilms.net
Past reviews can be found at: http://www.epinions.com/user-elerad?public=yes or http://us.imdb.com/ReviewsBy?John+Beachem
* * * * * - One of the best movies of the year. * * * * - Great flick, try and catch this one. * * * - Okay movie, hits and misses. * * - Pretty bad, see it at your own risk. * - See this one only if you enjoy pain.
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews