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THE CREW

By Susannah Breslin | August 25, 2000

The Crew is this summer’s idiot answer to Space Cowboys (that other movie about four old white guys), a flick wholly bereft of funny lines or even vaguely plausible plot twists, a summer movie that simultaneously succeeds in embarrassing not one but two Academy Award-affiliated actors too young to play old fogies and too old to be making such a***s of themselves in front of the camera.
Being peddled as “Grumpy Old Men” meets “Goodfellas,” The Crew takes four old ex-mobsters in Florida out for a miserable stroll down streets riddled with lame Viagra, incontinence, and going-deaf jokes, while handing them guns and criminal-mindedness in an attempt to make the whole thing entertaining. Not. Richard Dreyfuss (Mr. Holland’s Opus), unable to make up his mind about whether to sound like a Miamian Jew or an ex-wiseguy, leads the pack as Booby Bertellemeo; Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights), who must stop having facelifts or he’ll be shaving behind his ears, is Joey “Bats” Pistella; Dan Hedaya (The Hurricane), who is malnourished in the any-lines-at-all department, is Mike “The Brick” Donatelli; and Seymour Cassel (Rushmore), who doesn’t say much of anything at all, is Tony “Mouth” Donato. Unlike the real-life senior stars of “Space Cowboys,” these middle-aged actors portray old men as a*s idiots of the world that we could care less about visiting in the rest home.
The four fellows live in a dump of a hotel, the Raj Mahal, in South Beach, at risk of being thrown out in favor of the moneyed models and modelizers who want to move in and remodel. Therefore, the guys go find a dead body, blow its head off, and leave it in the lobby to scare off the influx of underage outsiders. Of course–why didn’t I think of that. Because this movie can’t go sixty-seconds without an insanely uninteresting plot shift, it turns out the body was the daddy of a big drug kingpin. And then it turns out Mouth mouths-off after sex and lets it slip to Jennifer Tilly (Bound), as Ferris Lowenstein the Stripper, that they did in the body. And then Bobby, it turns out, is looking out for his daughter and when the police come investigating it turns out…. It’s all enough to make you want to go take a nap, even if you’re not geriatric.
Not surprisingly, The Crew was penned by the evil soul who wrote a full 104 episodes of The Golden Girls, Barry Fanaro, and ultimately The Crew is more Golden Girls on Viagra than anything that should be allowed to profit off The Sopranos-generated mobster-worshipping hysteria. Smaller but equally stupid roles from Jeremy Piven (Very Bad Things) as Detective Steve Menteer and Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) as Detective Olivia Neal–the cop duo who come in to find out whodunit–don’t do a damn thing to make this flick anymore palatable to anyone in the audience sans senility.

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