By
Ian Caruth
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Burt Reynolds' new un-comedy brings wrinkles, broken bones to theaters
Grade: D
Perhaps the backlash has finally arrived.
Just a few months ago, beautiful young people were apparently the only human beings available to star in Hollywood movies.
The result? Pretty, stylish and often vacuous entertainment, perhaps best embodied by "54" and "Coyote Ugly." Youth and beauty reigned supreme, and people over 40 were tragic setpieces who existed only as vague cautionary examples.
But now the worm has turned. The oldsters, it seems, have been watching- and they're pissed!
In last year's marvelous "Being John Malkovich," a cadre of octogenarians schemed for control of a younger man's mind. From the recent "Space Cowboys," viewers learned that old people are the earth's saviors, and that they had better let them do what they want. In "The Crew," the implicit message is far more grim- old people are out to maim and kill the young.
The titular crew is a foursome of former mob heavies who have, at the film's beginning, settled into quiet, undignified retirement in Miami. They work various odd jobs, intimidate at random (old habits, and people, apparently, die hard) and kvetch about the vagaries of aging.
In an early scene, Burger King worker and "crew" member Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds) menaces a single mother and her child when they ask for a special order, and then breaks his youthful manager's finger. It is actually one of the funnier scenes in a not-so-funny movie.
The spectacularly unlikely plot centers around the crew members "saving" their oceanside apartment complex from new, young and beautiful tenants by scaring them away with a fake murder. This involves the theft of a body from the morgue and the literal defacement of said body, who - these things happen - turns out to be the father of a South American drug lord.
This sets in motion various types of mayhem, including racially prejudiced - and often muddled - jokes.
Moreover, brutality is too often mistaken for humor, including a scene involving a rat with a gasoline-soaked, fiery rag tied to its tail, and the gruesome crippling, death or corpse mutilation of innumerable young men by their older, more cantankerous counterparts.
There is actually some humor, thanks to several well timed one-liners by Richard Dreyfuss and the always appealing Reynolds. The ever-sleazy Dan Hedaya and a Harpo Marx-like Seymour Cassel round out the crew, and they are quite a rascally bunch. Farting, cartoonishly violent, prejudiced, perpetually at the strip club and lasciviously ogling the gorgeous young women around their apartment complex, these men are what Maxim readers dream of becoming in their golden years.
It is nice to see some films starring and being marketed to an older age bracket. However, it is truly disturbing to see hyperviolent fantasies like this film, wherein the cracked face of age grins to reveal a blood-drenched maw.
