The Crew Reviews

This genial, Elmore Leonard-esque mob comedy about geezer crooks isn't exactly a groundbreaker &#151 think TOUGH GUYS or GOING IN STYLE &#151 but it is much better than you'd expect, largely thanks to an extremely game cast. The setup: Four senior citizens (Richard Dreyfuss, Seymour Cassel, Burt Reynolds and Dan Hedaya), who just happen to be ex-Jersey wiseguys, are rotting away in a decaying hotel in the yuppie mecca that is South Beach, Miami. Faced with eviction, they steal a John Doe corpse from the morgue and blow its head off in the hotel lobby, figuring — correctly — that the fashion models who've overrun the place will beat a hasty retreat. Unfortunately, the corpse turns out to be the father of a paranoid Latin drug lord who's convinced he, too, will be rubbed out by a mysterious rival. The complications that naturally ensue are no more or less plausible than those in any well-made farce, but the geezers themselves are so engaging you'll hardly care that in real life they'd be considered borderline sociopaths. Reynolds is particularly funny as Bats (a nickname that has at least two meanings); Cassel, a John Cassavetes rep veteran who doesn't work as much as he should, does a wonderfully soulful turn as a laconic guy (named Mouth, of course) with a soft spot for the ladies (Lainie Kazan, hilarious as a yenta millionairess); and Dreyfuss (no nickname, for reasons we shouldn't give away) and Hedaya (the Brick, ditto) steal nearly every scene they're in as the brains of this not-so-wild bunch. There are a couple of slow patches, mostly involving Carrie-Anne Moss as Dreyfuss's long lost-daughter, but director Michael Dinner keeps things moving efficiently, and it's clear that everybody involved is having a ball, which is infectious. There are a few unexpected parodies of other mob movies that are pretty much worth the price of admission; let's just say you'll never look at the Copacabana sequence from GOODFELLAS in quite the same way again.