Mr. Cranky's rating:
In fact, "The Crew" is the hellspawn of every gangster film ever made.
This film is like one of those cute babies who looks so sweet and innocent from a distance, but as soon as you get close to it, the little bastard vomits all over you and then urinates in your face.
In fact, "The Crew" is the hellspawn of every gangster film ever made. There simply isn't a moment in the film -- not one -- that isn't stolen directly from some other movie. It's shameless, disgusting, insulting garbage, and the people who made it -- every last one of them, down to the guy who toasted Burt Reynolds' bagels -- should be jammed into a Tuffshed and blasted into space. I swear to God, half of this film is lifted scene-for-scene from "Goodfellas," only now the characters are sixty years old.
Take the first few minutes, where four young wiseguys are driving in a car, hear a kicking in the trunk, then stop. They open the trunk and there's a guy in there. Seen that scene before? To make it worse, the whole thing is being narrated by Bobby Bartellemeo (Richard Dreyfuss). First he tells us how he always wanted to be a wiseguy. Then he tells us how everyone got their name. There's Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds), who hits people with bats. There's Mike "The Brick" Donatelli (Dan Hedaya), who's dumb as a brick. There's Tony "Mouth" Donato (Seymour Cassel), who doesn't talk.
The only reason the movie was made was because some imbecile thought the simple idea of four old mobsters was funny. "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if there were four old mobsters, and they did stuff?" Something like that. The story after we're introduced to them as old people involves them accidentally angering a drug lord (Miguel Sandoval). There's also a subplot involving Bobby's long lost daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss), who just happens to be the detective investigating the incident with the drug lord. Every single scene, from the resolution of the father-daughter relationship, to Mouth's involvement with a stripper (Jennifer Tilly), to the speeches given by the drug lord, are things that we've not only seen once in other films, but over and over, literally dozens of times. The result is nothing less than an abomination of film.
Was it really that bad?
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