The Crew Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

The Not-So-Golden Boys

Once upon a time, way back in the dark and distant 1980's, one of the most popular shows on television was The Golden Girls, the story of four ladies of a certain age in south Florida. Now, Barry Farnaro, who wrote that show, is practicing a little equal opportunity scripting, with The Crew, which puts four gentlemen of a certain age, and--at least once upon a time--not so gentle, into a Miami setting. Is this some sort of trend? After gearing up four old-timers in space suits and shooting them into space for Space Cowboys, now Hollywood suits up four more old-timers in Hawaiian shirts and sends them into the sun, sex (but not necessarily for them), and drug wars of South Beach, Miami.

The added twist is that these four guys were once "wiseguys," respected or at least feared, members of the mob. Now, they spend their days in a dreary senior citizen residential hotel, watching people with few years, more money, and much less clothing take over the neighborhood. Life-long pals, they have ended up in Florida because Bobby cherishes the idea of reuniting with the daughter he lost touch with a quarter of a century ago. Bats, so nicknamed not because he has a few in his belfry (which might be a possibility) but for his fondness for using a baseball bat for rather non-sporting purposes, rages through jobs at Burger King and what is left of his life. Brick keeps up with the old gang (literally old, literally a gang) with Christmas cards. Mouth, once a lady-killer (perhaps in more than one sense), now is reduced to keeping company with Ferris, as long as he can afford her fees.

Since their hotel and its neighborhood are undergoing gentrification, the invasion of a rundown neighborhood by very upscale or yup-scale beautiful people, they fear losing their apartments. So, they cook up the rather half-baked idea of stealing a body from the mortuary where Brick now conveniently works, and make it look as if there has been a gang-related killing at their hotel.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go anywhere but Miami, and their unwitting even unliving accomplice turns out to be the father of Raul, a drug lord. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

So, as the subplots come spilling over onto each other, the drug lord, convinced that his father was murdered, begins a bloodbath seeking revenge. He happens to live next door to Pepper, Ferris's stepmother, whom the boys have agreed to "whack," which mainly raises the question, just when did Lainie Kazan turn into a female drag queen?

I've mentioned in other reviews that I am not comfortable with gangster comedies. Although we are spare most of the violence, we know that there is a lot more than we see. A couple of inoffensive henchmen are killed, and we see their bodies hanging upside down; the punch line of this scene is that the knots holding up their bodies become untied, and the bodies crash to the ground. (What a laugh riot!)

You may have guess by now that there is nothing like a convincing plot, and in The Crew, there is nothing like a convincing plot. At least Fanaro's script avoids most of the really dreadful body-disfunction jokes of Space Cowboys and The Klumps. Maybe once a television writer... (There is, be warned, another entry in the Big Daddy tradition of male-bonding-while-urinating scenes.) Director Michael Dinner (I will resist the temptation to pun) hails from the same medium, best known for Fantasy Island--not even the original seventies' series but the dreary rehash of a couple of years ago. He seems to have preserved the habit of pausing for commercial messages while shifting from one improbably linked subplot to the other.

It all comes down to a bunch of old, perhaps not so old guys (Richard Dreyfuss, like Tommy Lee Jones in Cowboys, is at least a decade too young) doing what they do best. They create a rich, heady chemistry, appearing to play along for more laughs than we in the audience get. But, as a dessert to the dreariest summer buffet Hollywood has dished up in some time (sorry, Mr. Dinner, I could not resist), it is at least a good excuse for sitting for an hour and a half in a cool, dark place munching on popcorn, never forgetting to keep my feet dry (no matter how sticky the theater floor) and my heart with at least a noble thought or two.