# Crew, The (2000)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

    PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
    "We Put the SIN in Cinema"

Those hazy, crazy, lazy days of summer are sure taking their toll on Hollywood. Take a look at the stars they're slapping up on the screen. Just this month, we've already seen four wrinkled asses in Space Cowboys, four unhappily married comedians in The Original Kings of Comedy and a fifty-year-old rubber suit yanked out of the mothballs for an appearance in Godzilla 2000. Yup, that's right - the bright, powerful sun is actually aging Hollywood before our very eyes.

The latest offering of geriatric entertainment comes in the form of The Crew, a blandly entertaining tale of four New Jersey wiseguys enjoying their retirement in South Miami Beach. Over the years, they've gone from worrying about witnesses, snitches and moles, to making sure they show up on time for the early bird special. But The Crew isn't all bingo and bladder jokes – there's also an asinine story involving drug lords, crooked cops and family reunions.

More on that later. First let's meet the four geezers:

Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds, Mystery, Alaska) earned his nickname by maniacally wielding a baseball bat back in his Jersey heyday. Bats, who has eyebrows thicker and blacker than Star Jones, is currently between jobs, but has been fired from most of the Burger King restaurants in the greater Miami area.

Mike the Brick (Dan Hedaya, Shaft) never worried about the condition in which he left his victims in his previous line of work. But now the Brick (as in `dumb as a') fixes up the stiffs at a local mortuary. The Brick also keeps in touch with numerous retired mobsters from all over the country.

Bobby Bartellemeo (Richard Dreyfuss, Krippendorf's Tribe) doesn't have a cool nickname, but he gets to narrate the story. A Miami tour bus driver, Bobby longs to find the daughter he lost contact with when he was sent to the clink several years ago. Don't worry, Bobby. She'll be easy to find. There's only one female character in the film that comes close to being your daughter's age.

Tony "The Mouth" Donato (Seymour Cassel, Max's father from Rushmore) gives dancing lessons to the love-deprived senior citizens of South Miami Beach. Despite his nickname, the Mouth doesn't say much, except, as it turns out, after he has sex. Which is how the four codgers get into trouble.

After The Crew introduces its characters, the Mouth blabs to a prostitute about a phony hit he and his friends staged, and she blackmails the men to whack her mother-in-law. Like you'd expect, things spiral out of control and wind up in a madcap, shoot-‘em-up finale. The best moment of the film is a send-up of GoodFellas, where the four silver foxes are led through the kitchen of their favorite restaurant while they greet each cook and waiter with a smile and a nod. Nobody at my packed screening seemed to make the connection, but they all broke out in laughter and applause when the set piece reached its inevitable conclusion. Go figure.

The Crew was directed by Michael Dinner, a television director who hasn't helmed a feature film since 1988's Bobcat Goldthwait stinker Hot to Trot, which is widely regarded as on of the worst films of that decade. The mediocre script was penned by Barry Fanaro, who co-wrote the much funnier Farrelly brother's flick, Kingpin. In terms of gangster flicks, it rates somewhere between GoodFellas and the ill-advised spoof Mafia!, but that's kind of like saying a woman is less attractive than Charlize Theron, but better looking than Janet Reno. There's also a lot more nudity than you'd expect in a PG-13 film.

1:29 - PG-13 for brief nudity, sexual content, violence and language

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