Hey folks, Harry here with a look at the Barry Sonnenfeld produced comedy, THE CREW. This has been a film that I've been curious about ever since hearing the names of the 4 male leads... RICHARD DREYFUSS, BURT REYNOLDS, DAN HEDAYA and SEYMOUR CASSELL. Now sure... all four of them are at... weird stages in their careers... but, just maybe there might be some great chemistry at work here. Well, this was an EXTREMELY ADVANCE SCREENING, so know that the film that Artie saw... will most likely undergo quite a bit of tweaking here and there before we all see it. So... with that in mind... here's the review...
Hello, Harry
Longtime reader, first-time poster
My wife and I were invited to a sneak preview of "The Crew," a new movie
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya, and Seymour Cassell
last night and I thought I'd write in and tell you about it.
The basic plot is that these four former "wise guys" (lots of "Goodfellas"
shots and allusions) end up spending their golden years in Miami, but are
slowly being forced out by more and more club kid-types moving in and
jacking up their rates. So, they stage a fake shooting of a corpse (Dan
Hedaya's character works in a morgue) that turns out to be the missing
father of a big-time drug lord. Comedy ensues.
Okay, there are a lot of problems with the movie that I'll go into, but I
need to say right off the bat - it was truly hilarious. The audience was
comprised of mostly older folks with a few twenty-somethings thrown into the
mix and everyone laughed their way through the entire thing. It comes down
to one thing-CHEMISTRY. Who would've thought that putting Dreyfuss,
Reynolds, Hedaya, and Cassell in a buddy movie would turn out this way.
They have impeccable chemistry together and all of the best scenes in the
movie are when the four of them are capering together. The supporting cast,
Jeremy Piven, Carrie-Ann Moss, Jennifer Tilly, and others, simply weren't
that great in comparison, Moss being positively wooden in her performance as
a police detective.
Here's what's wrong with the movie - the plot. We were told that this was a
rough cut with a temp track (the temp track was actually very good), but it
looked fairly well put together. Here's the problem, things happen that
make no sense. There are leaps from scene to scene and it feels like scenes
are completely missing. The entire motivation to shoot the corpse isn't
very well explained until later. The guys will be going along doing
something and then they'll jump to something else. Rather confusing. I was
looking for a thread of something to follow, but it was hard to do. The
entire Jeremy Piven subplot is not fleshed out at all and I generally hated
his character all the way through as well as the Carrie-Ann Moss one because
whenever she was onscreen, nothing funny was happening.
However, when the four wise guys were on screen, it was almost always,
always, always funny. Dan Hedaya splits the comic relief with the seldom
speaking Seymour Cassell while tough guy Burt Reynolds (you have no idea how
loud people were laughing at the "Burger King" sequence) and cool-hand
Richard Dreyfuss hammer out the complications. There are shots in the movie
that make no sense, too. Sometimes it is a straight-up caper comedy, while
other times it is an artistically-directed "stylish" kind of film. The
creative shots need to go (ie. camera flying out of Cassell's mouth) and
just the story needs to be told.
Let me reiterate, this was a very, very much advanced screening. Apparently
afterwards there was a focus group, but my wife and I weren't picked, so we
don't know what they were talking about. The producers all seemed to be
lined up there (I know Barry Sonnenfeld is a producer on this, but I
wouldn't recognize him if I saw him). Hopefully, everything will get fixed
and a very funny, albeit very light movie will come out. It reminded me of
a movie I saw in college, "Tough Guys," with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas
at times. I haven't seen that movie in years, but it was about old cons
kicking young ass. Same thing with "Original Gangstas" a few years back
with all the blaxploitation stars.
Like I said, though, the chemistry of the cast took the film to another
level when the script let it down. Burt Reynolds is just darn funny.
-Artie Bremer
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