The Crew

Is "The Crew" entertaining? Sure it is. After all, it stars Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya and Seymour Cassel as retired gangsters, which is fun in itself. It boasts a magnificent comic performance from Miguel Sandoval as a paranoid Latino drug lord leading a band of incompetents. It includes Jennifer Tilly playing her customary slut with her customary aplomb, and Carrie-Anne Moss (the kick-ass chick from "The Matrix") gets a bit of screen time. It's a short film, and the minutes pass by agreeably.

Is it worth your seven bucks? No. Unfortunately, "The Crew" assembles the great cast named above, gives it a great plot to play with, and then just sits around watching the film unspool. What is manifestly supposed to be a madcap gangster comedy with the added bite of old-timer jokes becomes instead a genial yet ultimately forgettable ninety minutes.

Blame for this disappointment must be spread all around. The screenwriter, Barry Fanaro, comes up with a criminal shortage of good lines and cannot extract the maximum comic wattage from the potent-seeming situations he creates for his characters. The rare lines which do slam home right in the gut feel as lonely here as a few ripe peaches in an otherwise barren orchard. Even more unforgivably, director Michael "What's For" Dinner never whips up a comic frenzy, rarely shows any of the flash or style that a comedy like this requires, and never ever presses the action forward or holds it back until one is literally begging to laugh some more. His direction is just this side of competent, moving forward at a moderate pace without much incident or interest. The only time he gets something going, in his fizzy, brilliant depiction of the arsonous journey of a mouse with an alcohol-soaked rag tied to its tail, it merely serves to point up the deficiencies in the remainder of the direction. Why couldn't he have done anything this sparkling with the humans in the film?

And the cast, good as it has been throughout film history, seems to have bought into the blandness ethos as well, rarely adding that special bite to a line or that special flair to a pratfall that would leave the audience rolling in the aisles. Hedaya's presence is bland, Moss is wasted, and Tilly has played this general character so often it's impossible to really enjoy watching it one more time. Finally, Dreyfuss is one of the least convincing mobsters onscreen in some time, even for a comedy. He keeps slipping in and out of his accent, sometimes almost imperceptibly and sometimes blatantly. His screen presence is basically a big fat blank, even though his character has what is supposed to be the sentimental storyline. (Dinner makes a good decision not to waste too much time on this nonstarter of a subplot.) And his avuncular narration keeps slowing up the momentum of the story and robbing us of opportunities for laughter. Show, don't tell, goes the old rule, and there's a reason for it. Only when Dreyfuss's voiceovers leave the scene completely does the film start really trying to live up to its promise.

Of course, not everyone succumbs to the general malaise afflicting this film. Burt Reynolds and Lainie Kazan, among the cast members, consistently give their lines that added zip and panache that distinguish the comic genius from the merely genial wannabe; Reynolds' reading of the line "I know what the commercials say, but special orders do upset us" should be used by comic acting teachers everywhere. Sandoval, however, upstages them both, particularly with an eloquent, seemingly improvised monologue that begins "You know what I am? I am a cliche. And do you know what happens to cliches? They die." He is operatic and histrionic and hilarious as all get-out.

And even as Dreyfuss and Hedaya and Tilly and Moss are alternately wasted or waste themselves, they're still fun to watch just for themselves, accomplished actors all. While there's not much right with Fanaro's writing or Dinner's direction, there's nothing horribly wrong with it either. This is a pleasant film. But it could have been a terrific comedy, and the difference between what this film is and what it could have been is just about seven bucks of your hard-earned cash. Don't waste your money on a might-have-been. This "Crew" has the talent, but they don't get the job done right.

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