What would the Goodfellas or the Reservoir Dogs look like if we saw them in their twilight years?
Would they be reminiscing about old jobs, old massacres? Planning new ones? Or lolling on retirement hotel verandas, trying to “fuggedabout” the whole thing?
“The Crew” is a comedy that playfully imagines the old age of sixtysomething hoods. Now, movie gangsters usually meet such bad ends — gunned down, betrayed or tossed in the slammer — that we don’t think of them as becoming elderly crooks with problems, struggling along on their Mafia pensions. Of all celebrated movie gangsters, practically the only ones we followed into old age were Marlon Brando and Al Pacino’s Corleones — and, as Mafia Dons, they never had to worry about loose dentures or bingo tournaments.
But these wise guys do. “The Crew” is about four aging New York Italian-American gangsters — charmingly played by Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya and Seymour Cassel — in a Miami retirement hotel, and it may be one of the best potential TV pilots ever to play movie theaters. The director, Michael Dinner, and the writer, Barry Fanaro, are both TV veterans (Dinner from “The Wonder Years” and Fanaro from “The Golden Girls”). And though they’ve ticketed “The Crew” for the big screen from the start, their TV savvy is evident.
I didn’t expect much from “The Crew,” but I laughed all the way through it. Unlike most of the recent tongue-in-cheek Cosa Nostra comedies (the overrated “Analyze This,” the pallid “Mickey Blue Eyes” and the unspeakable “Jane Austen’s Mafia”), “The Crew” gets its humor from life as well as from other movies, and the Crew members are a typical but likable lot. Reynolds plays Joey “Bats” Pistella, the hothead (the Robert De Niro type). Hedaya, with his gloomy eyes and chewed-over delivery, is Mike “The Brick” Donatelli, the patsy. Cassel (“Faces” and “Minnie and Moskowitz”) is ladies’ man Tony “Mouth” Donato. And Dreyfuss plays narrator Bobby Bartellemeo, the Harvey Keitel type and also the guy who led them all to Miami, in search of his long-lost daughter.
Fanaro and Dinner introduce their half-wise guys with pungent little “Mean Streets”-style cameos; then they show the quartet at their violent youthful peak, blowing up a truck full of contraband. Cut to today: they’re 60ish, single, living in the same Miami hotel, feeling the squeeze as the management tries to shove out all the old tenants. The movie blames Madonna for making Miami less a geriatric hangout and more a hip new playground, and the four outfit pals, like the rest of the oldsters, are being swept away.
But these guys have some useful skills the other sexagenarians lack.
Simply wanting to hang on to their rooms, they steal a corpse from the local mortuary (where Mike “The Brick” is an ace cosmetician) and blast its head off with a shotgun, suggesting a gangland killing and prompting a mass exodus from their hotel. This ruse scares their landlords, who beg them to stay. And though it works temporarily, it also puts the foursome in danger from the son of the man who ended up as the unidentified corpse: paranoid local drug lord Raul Ventana (Miguel Sandoval). For the rest of the movie, the four keep running afoul of Ventana, especially after Tony “Mouth” spills the beans to prostitute-blackmailer Ferris (Jennifer Tilly). Meanwhile, the seeming gang war also attracts hip young local cops Olivia Neal (Carrie-Anne Moss) and her ex-boyfriend Steve Menteer (Jeremy Piven).
As the omniscient narrator, Dreyfuss’ Bobby supplies an intelligence and bite that are crucial to the movie’s humor, because the main running gag is the dumbness of all the other crooks. The Crew can’t even shoot a dead body properly, their “idea man” is the half-crazy Joey “Bats,” and cocaine czar Ventana and his ill-paid, inept henchmen are even dopier.
One of the movie’s funniest scenes involves a rat in a maze, with a flaming fuse on its tail, set loose to blow up the swanky home of Ferris’ stepmother, Pepper Lowenstein (Lainie Kazan) — and that crazed rat is an obvious metaphor for all these felonious foul-ups, both the good-bad guys and the bad-bad ones.
Writer Fanaro, whose “Golden Girls” also had a Miami old-age setting, scored a surprising hit with his Farrelly Brothers gross-out bowling comedy “Kingpin,” and “The Crew” is often just as funny — even if, at the end, it gets a bit too ridiculous. Fanaro intended this script as a directorial vehicle for “The Crew’s” producer Barry (“Get Shorty”) Sonnenfeld, but the movie doesn’t really lose anything with Dinner at the helm. Dinner disappeared from feature films for a decade after his 1988 debacle “Hot to Trot” — an ill-advised “talking horse” comedy starring Bobcat Goldthwait, with John Candy as the horse’s voice — but here, he shows the style, smarts and flair that made his Catholic school comedy, “Heaven Help Us,” a 1985 sleeper.
In this goofy parody-noir stew, with its weird angles and extravagant visual contrasts, all the actors are fun to watch. Dreyfuss’ Bobby supplies the right wry perspective, and Reynolds makes Joey a sometimes-hilarious psychopath. Hedaya displays his great, goofy, against-the-grain slow timing and Cassel, though somewhat wasted, makes the most of his low-key part. The others are good too: Tilly with her whiny ditz part, Kazan as the blowzy, super-maternal Pepper and Sandoval as the marvelously exasperated, totally confused drug king.
Coming so soon after “Space Cowboys,” “The Crew” might seem part of a Grumpy Old New Wave or Geezer Chic movement. But, despite its great cast and funny script, “The Crew” was dropped by two major studios (Disney and DreamWorks) and had to be financed independently; the studios, trapped in their usual Peter Pan mindset, worried that kids would ignore it. Really? “The Crew,” like “Space Cowboys,” shows that few setups work as well as old pros getting together, firing up that old gray magic. Jennifer Love Hewitt? Freddie Prinze Jr.? Another moldy teen sex comedy?
Fuggedaboutit.
`THE CREW’
(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Michael Dinner; written by Barry Fanaro; photographed by Juan Ruiz-Anchia; edited by Nicholas C. Smith; production designed by Peter Larkin; music by Steve Bartek; produced by Barry Sonnenfeld, Barry Josephson. A Touchstone Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:28. MPAA rating: PG-13 (sexual content, violence and language).
THE CAST
Bobby ……………….. Richard Dreyfuss
Joey “Bats” ………….. Burt Reynolds
Mike “The Brick” ……… Dan Hedaya
Tony “Mouth” …………. Seymour Cassel
Olivia Neal ………….. Carrie-Anne Moss
Ferris Lowenstein …….. Jennifer Tilly
