These Wise Guys Could Sure Stand to Be a Brainier ‘Crew’

A shaggy-dog story in support hose, “The Crew” should effect a marked upswing in the opening of IRAs, Keoughs and contributions to 401(k)s. After all, who wants to end up like its four hotel-dwelling wheeze-guys, standing in the rain for early-bird specials, driving cars with fins and watching the EMS bring out the old while the real estate agents bring in the new?

Fortunes change, as they must, in this feature by Emmy-winning director Michael Dinner, which must have made for an exciting pitch meeting and certainly couldn’t have been made without its fab four--Burt Reynolds, Richard Dreyfuss, Dan Hedaya and Seymour Cassel. None of them can possibly be this old. But the end result shows how easily movies based on good ideas get made without scripts. The movie is so mild, so benign, its humiliation-to-vindication arc so predictable and its old-folks jokes so feeble that you want them to start shooting the remake immediately.

Doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that Reynolds was ventilating sodomites in “Deliverance”? As Joey (Bats) Pistella, he’s terrorizing mothers at Burger King. And threatening to exercise his own brand of squeeze play on male underwear models with apartment envy.

His buddies, friends since their New York mob apprenticeships, are more mellow, but no better off. Bobby Bartellemeo (Dreyfuss) is in Miami because he’s looking for his long-lost daughter; Mike the Brick Donatelli (Hedaya) is just as thick as he was in the ‘60s, when he had the brainstorm of a labor union for mob soldiers; and Tony the Mouth Donato (Cassel) is as closemouthed as ever--except with a certain member of the “leisure profession” named Ferris (Jennifer Tilly). This becomes a problem after the already deceased John Doe the boys use to feign a yuppie-scattering mob hit at their hotel turns out to be the father of a paranoid South American drug lord (Miguel Sandoval).

Investigating the crimes both real and fabricated are detectives Olivia Neal (Carrie-Anne Moss of “The Matrix”) and her ex-wannabe boyfriend Steve (Jeremy Piven), who should know better than to date a woman who can perform DNA tests on the rogue blond hairs that turn up on his clothing. Like the yearning of Bobby for his daughter, the young couple’s romantic wrangling merely distracts from Dinner’s better bits: an arson-abetting rat that sets fire to the drug lord’s house or the quasi-fantasy sequence involving the drug lord’s dead father (Manuel Estanillo) and his last day on the beach. Lainie Kazan is at her blaring best as Ferris’ deli-owning stepmother.

But best of all is the wise guy reunion at movie’s end, which seems to feature every Scorsese extra in existence as well as the four horsemen of the mob apocalypse--Frank Vincent, Louis Guss, Ron Karabatsos and Joe Rigano, who offer a wise lesson: If you fire a shotgun from a wheelchair, you have to watch out for the recoil.

* MPAA rating: PG-13 for sexual content, violence and language. Times guidelines: bathroom humor, sexual situations, gun violence.

‘The Crew’

Richard Dreyfuss: Bobby Bartellemeo

Burt Reynolds: Joey “Bats” Pistella

Dan Hedaya: Mike “The Brick” Donatelli

Seymour Cassel: Tony “Mouth” Donato

Carrie-Anne Moss: Det. Olivia Neal

A George Litto Pictures production and a Sonnenfeld/Josephson Worldwide Entertainment production, released by Touchstone Pictures. Director Michael Dinner. Producers Barry Sonnenfeld, Barry Josephson. Executive producers George Litto, Michael S. Glick. Screenplay by Barry Fanaro. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz-Anchia. Editor Nicholas C. Smith. Costume designer Betsy Cox. Music Steve Bartek. Production designer Peter Larkin. Art director J. Mark Harrington. Set decorator Barbara Peterson. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

In general release.