OxfordPress.com

Grade: F

Verdict: As entertaining as Ovaltine, it's a lead contender for worst movie of the year.

Details: Starring Richard Dreyfuss and Burt Reynolds. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, violence and profanity. 1 hour, 28 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review.

Review: "The Crew" stereotypes Jews and Hispanics and belittles the group it's supposed to be celebrating, retirement-age Americans. Even worse, the movie's not even funny.

Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Dan Hedaya and Seymour Cassel play four mafia wiseguys, now retired to a creaky Miami apartment building where the rent keeps climbing due to the South Beach renaissance. The guys fix that by stealing a John Doe from the city morgue and leaving the body in their building's lobby, making it look like a mob hit. Residents flee; the rent drops.

The movie is so out of touch with reality, it shows national news teams covering the story of the fake killing. Hello, this is Miami. A story like that would be lucky to rate a paragraph in the daily paper.

Anyway, things get complicated, because the corpse turns out to have been the dad of a Latin drug boss (Miguel Sandoval), who happens to live next door to a rich Jewish widow named Pepper (Lainie Kazan), whose stepdaughter just happens to be a stripper named Ferris (Jennifer Tilly), whom Cassel has been paying for sex.

Some lame plot twists and accidents ensue, all investigated by two cops (Jeremy Piven and Carrie-Anne Moss). If you're surprised to hear that the female officer is Dreyfuss' long lost daughter, maybe your expectations are low enough for this movie.

"The Crew" is jerry-buit entirely of tired, crowd-tested pieces: grumpy old men, mafia clichés, dumb slapstick comedy and, of course, a few gratuitous peeks inside Ferris' strip club. To call this movie by-the-numbers would be an insult to numbers.

Dreyfuss must have meditated on his Oscar in order to deliver lines like, "Fuhgeddaboutit, nobody's gonna whack nobody." Then there's the scene where he has to hold Reynolds' head in the toilet bowl, and you wonder if Burt's toupee is going to peel off. That's the closest the movie comes to suspense, whereas the level of humor is along the lines of this quip from Pepper: "Thank God her father is dead, 'cause this would've killed him." Oh no, stop, you're killing me.

When Reynolds yells, "We would have been better off dead," you can't help thinking it's an ad lib, that he's speaking for the whole cast. Oh, well, here's hoping they enjoyed some nice beach time while in Miami. But why write any more about "The Crew?" There's no reason to spend too much effort on it. After all, the people who made the movie sure didn't.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service