The Crew (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Dolby Digital Trailer-City Theatrical Trailer Trailer-Joe Dirt; As Good As It Gets; Men In Black Filmographies-Cast
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	83:58
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Michael Dinner
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Richard Dreyfuss Burt Reynolds Dan Hedaya Seymour Cassel Carrie-Anne Moss Jennifer Tilly Lainie Kazan Jeremy Piven
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Steve Bartek

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Spanish Arabic Hindi Portuguese	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, mildly
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The Crew is described on the cover as Goodfellas meets Grumpy Old Men, and for a while there, the satires of the former come thick and fast, but it gets a lot better when the elements of the latter film are picked up. I've never been a fan of the Grumpy Old Men style of comedy, but this take on that theme works well, thanks in no small part to the comedic abilities of the four leads.

    The story revolves around four men who were once gangsters, but have since retired and gone to Miami: Bobby Bartellemeo (Richard Dreyfuss), Joey "Bats" Pistella (Burt Reynolds), Mike "The Brick" Donatelli (Dan Hedaya), and Tony "Mouth" Donato (Seymour Cassel). When these men were young, they were among the meanest of all the hoods in New Jersey, but the story picks up proper when time catches up with them, and they are living in a fleabag apartment block on the coast. When they moved to Miami, it was a paradise for old retirees, but it has suddenly become a trendy place for the young to move to, and the old tenants in the building our heroes occupy are being carried out faster than they can move in. So, the landlord decides to up their rent quite substantially, which prompts them to borrow a body from the local morgue where Mike works and use it to stage a murder.

    Unfortunately for our four heroes, the body was that of Louis Ventana (Manuel Estanillo), the father of a South American drug lord known as Raul Ventana (Miguel Sandoval). Raul is not the nicest of lads, and he orders his men to kill all his enemies as vengeance for the rather grisly end that his father met, which is one of the funniest jokes about elderly mobsters I've seen in a while. Anyway, two detectives are investigating the murder of Louis Ventana: Olivia Neal (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Steve Menteer (Jeremy Piven), who once had a relationship but now Olivia can't stand even working on the same case as Steve. While I am thinking of it, it is nice to see Carrie-Anne Moss in a film that doesn't take itself so seriously, because the last two films I saw her in (The Matrix and Memento, in that order) were, to be frank, pieces of crap. Here, she gets to showcase her acting abilities in a role that, while very limited, is quite pivotal to the story, as well as very good for its overall tone.

    Now, the kicker here is that Bobby had a wife and daughter before he was jailed for a few years, only to find them gone when he was released, and he has been trying in vain to track his little girl down. All he has is an old photo, and while I picked her identity right off the bat, the way this thread resolves itself is very well done. Another interesting thread in the film is that Mouth, who got that nickname because of the general silence he exhibits in the presence of his colleagues, spills the beans about the staged murder to a stripper by the name of Ferris Lowenstein (Jennifer Tilly). Ferris blackmails our heroes into whacking her mother, Pepper (Lainie Kazan), but they can't go through with it and kidnap her instead, using a rat with a lit cloth tied to its tail in order to burn down Pepper's house. More trouble starts when the rat wanders over into Raul's Florida mansion and sets it ablaze, and thus, Raul is angry and out for revenge once again.

    Okay, it's not the greatest story I've heard, and I can't help but wonder what the result might have been if Michael Dinner had been replaced by Guy Ritchie, but this film is well worth a look if you have a sense of humour.

Video

    This transfer is presented in the proper aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. There is a rather amusing mock-commercial presented at 49:53, which is windowboxed at 1.33:1, which is just as well. It would be a mistake to present this film without 16x9 Enhancement simply because thirty seconds of it would be reduced in resolution by this.

    The transfer is very sharp, with plenty of detail discernable in brightly lit scenes. Unfortunately, the shadow detail is on the ordinary side, with fine detail simply not being present in the darker sections of the picture. At best, the detail in low-lit scenes can be described as more than adequate. There is no low-level noise.

    The colours in this transfer are variably saturated, with the dingy apartment block and the restaurants the old residents dine at being subdued and rather dull. The Miami beaches and later parts of the film, however, are more bright and lifelike. The transfer renders these schemes without any problems or composite artefacts.

    MPEG artefacts were not present in this transfer. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some minor aliasing in such objects as car grilles and guns, but these were well within acceptable limits. Film artefacts consisted of some minor nicks and scratches on the film, the worst being a large black mark in the lower centre of the frame at 12:47.

    The English subtitles on this disc are about eighty percent faithful to the original dialogue, with a few slight variations thrown in on occasion. Burned-in subtitles are at 36:21, 61:52, 64:35, and 69:30, which is very annoying if you happen to understand enough Spanish to follow what is being said at these points.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    A total of four soundtracks can be found on this particular DVD, all of which are in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a bitrate of 448 kilobits per second. The first, and default, soundtrack is the original English dialogue, with dubs in French, Italian, and Spanish thrown in for good measure. I stuck with the English dialogue due to time constraints, although I am sure it would be interesting to sample a film about elderly gangsters in Italian.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand at all times, with no limits posed by any of the characters' accents. There were no discernable problems with audio sync, either.

    The music in this film is credited to Steve Bartek, and while it is not especially remarkable, it does a reasonable job of supporting the on-screen action. It has a nice, cartoonish feel about it, which is a good theme to adopt with a film like this.

    The surround channels are generally used in this soundtrack to create a quiet, simple, ambient sound field, with no particular moments where the surrounds are really used in a remarkable way. The only notable use of the surround channels is at 47:10, when the winds are blowing around the ruins of the mansion behind Miguel Sandoval.

    The subwoofer was mildly utilised to support the occasional bass-heavy sound effect, such as car engines or bodies hitting the floor, but it was not worked too hard.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    This menu takes the prize for being the ugliest of the static variety I have seen from a major distributor, and it is 16x9 Enhanced.

Theatrical Trailer

    This one minute and fifty-eight second trailer is presented in the aspect ratio of 1.33:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded audio.

Trailer - Joe Dirt

   This one minute and forty-nine second trailer is presented in the aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded audio, and it is not 16x9 Enhanced.

Trailer - As Good As It Gets

   This two minute and twenty-three second trailer is presented in the aspect ratio of approximately 1.85:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded audio, and it is not 16x9 Enhanced.

Trailer - Men In Black

   This two minute and nineteen second trailer is presented in the aspect ratio of 1.85:1 with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. Go figure.

Filmographies

    Limited filmographies for Richard Dreyfuss, Burt Reynolds, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Jennifer Tilly are available from this menu. They are not very well laid out or even particularly interesting. Full biographies would have been preferred.

    The Region 1 version of this disc is distributed by Disney, which for me is more than enough reason not to import it. However, in terms of extras, there are some differences between the two.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• Featurette - Working The Crew
• Featurette - Action Overload
• Full Cast Biographies

    The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;

• Trailer - Joe Dirt
• Trailer - As Good As It Gets
• Trailer - Men In Black

   Considering that these featurettes appear to be little more than eight-minute "behind the scenes" type featurettes, they are not really worth the added effort and expense of importing the Region 1 disc. More complete biographies for Burt Reynolds and Richard Dreyfuss can be found elsewhere, too. I'd call this one even, although I have it in big-time for Disney, so I might be biased.

    The Crew deserved to do slightly better than it did when released theatrically, and it just goes to show how obsessed with youth our media has become when such an endearing effort falls by the wayside. Sit down and have a look at it, you'll find yourself giggling a fair bit more than you might expect.

    The video transfer is very good.

    The audio transfer is very good.

    The extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall