HTF Blu-ray Review: THE CREW (1 Viewer)

[Michael Reuben]

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The Crew (Blu-ray)


Studio: Image Entertainment
Rated: R
Film Length: 123 minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
HD Encoding: 1080i
HD Codec: AVC
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH; Spanish
MSRP: $35.98
Disc Format: 1 50 GB
Package: Keepcase
Theatrical Release Date: Jan. 12, 2009 (U.K.)
Blu-ray Release Date: Oct. 20, 2009



Introduction:

When it comes to the movies, America and England have a long history of give-and-take. England gives us stuff, and we take it. Where would Hollywood be without a long line of English donations including Chaplin, Hitchcock and James Bond? But England has its own cinematic traditions, including a certain kind of tough gangster picture of which some great examples are Get Carter and The Long Good Friday. (A more contemporary example, despite the post-Tarantino flippancy, is Layer Cake.)

The Crew appears to come from that same tradition, and when you first hear the Liverpool accents (so thick that they may challenge many American ears), you understand why this film was deemed too exotic for a U.S. theatrical release and was sent straight to home video. But the more you settle into The Crew, the more you get the sense of something familiar, as if coming upon a row of fast food restaurants in a foreign city. And then it hits you.

Drive on the left or drive on the right, but you can’t escape New Jersey. When you make a gangster film today, The Sopranos takes a piece.



The Feature:

Ged Brennan (Scot Williams) is the head of a local gang in contemporary Liverpool. Its business is boosting trucks with valuable cargo, but business has been poor lately. In the opening sequence, a heist does not go as planned. The dissatisfaction in Ged’s crew, all of whom have bills to pay, is mounting.

No one is more dissatisfied than Ged’s brother, known as “Ratter” (Kenny Doughty). The morning after the failed heist, Ratter shows up at the gang’s usual pub with his sidekick Paul the Hom (Philip Olivier), whose nickname refers to his sexual orientation and whose obvious drug habit makes him less than stable. Ratter and Paul have just learned that a big-time local gangster, Leo the Pig, has been murdered. This means that Leo’s business, the local drug trade, is up for grabs, and Ratter wants to expand. Ged will have none of it.

Ged is battling his own demons. His son is old enough to know what Ged does for a living and wants to join him. “You’re never going to work with me,” Ged tells him. “That’s why I send you to that big, posh private school.” Ged’s wife, Debs (Cordelia Bugeja), feels that Ged neglects her in favor of his crew, and she’s vulnerable to anyone who will pay her attention, including Pam Thompson (Rosie Fellner, the director’s wife), their hard-partying neighbor, whose husband Keith is assembling a package of investors for one of the many land development deals that is transforming Liverpool into a model of modern urban renewal.

Ged is one of Keith’s investors. For him, a big land deal is his ticket out of criminal life. When his brother Ratter and the rest of his crew discover that Ged is doing a business deal behind their backs, the news does not go down well.

These pressures on Ged don’t exist in a vaccum. Swirling around the edges is the Irish mob, represented by Dermot (Francis Magee), who used Leo the Pig as their Liverpool distributor and now need a new connection. There’s also Franner (Stephen Graham), who stood above Leo in the chain of command and has lost what the American mob would call “a good earner”. It’s Franner who comes calling to make inquiries around town, looking for who killed Leo and offering big money for information. It’s Franner who stands up at Leo’s wake and makes a pointed speech about young crews who don’t have any respect for tradition (and then calls in the strippers). And it’s Franner who, when the various parties responsible for Leo’s death are ultimately identified, oversees the brutal retribution.

Let’s not forget the Serbian mob, represented by Lepi (Goran Kostic), who runs a popular strip bar, through which every crook in town seems to pass. (Comparisons to the Bada Bing are inescapable.) The Serbians, we’re told, have been trying to get started in Liverpool for some time, and if they ever do get started, they’ll be unstoppable. Just how dangerous they can be is demonstrated when a key member of Ged Brennan’s crew, Moby (Rory McCann), makes the mistake of running up a 900 pound tab for lap dances and other indulgences at Lepi’s club. Unable to pay due to the crew’s lousy earnings, Moby incurs a serious beatdown instigated by Lepi’s bulldog Dusan (Mem Ferda). This leads to a brutal, refereed, one-on-one showdown between Moby and Dusan as a way to make peace between Brennan’s crew and the Serbians. And as so often happened in The Sopranos, the personal rancor from this confrontation spills over into business and injects a shot of rocket fuel as the film speeds toward its conclusion.

It says something about the level of cinematic violence in The Crew that, for all the brutality of these sequences, Moby remains the film’s comic relief, mostly because of his gross-out sexual proclivities. At least one of his scenes would be too much even for an American Pie movie.

The clash of family and friendship vs. criminal enterprise is a venerable element of gangster fiction from the Godfather saga and Once Upon a Time in America through The Sopranos and Brotherhood. What distinguishes The Crew is its very specific sense of time and place, which is primarily focused in Scot Williams’ performance as Ged Brennan. Williams is a Liverpool native so steeped in the atmosphere of the city that, on the disc’s commentary track, he can point out the street on which he lived as a boy and the neighboring street where John Lennon grew up. He can tell you the background of the neighborhoods where they filmed and explain the difference between a contemporary Liverpool accent and the one that prevailed when the Beatles were popular. All of that authentic history comes through in Williams’ performance as Ged Brennan, and you feel that this guy is a real product of these streets, fighting to hold every inch of ground.

The rest of the performances are equally good, especially Stephen Graham as Franner. Though little known here, Graham is an established presence in England and probably the biggest name in the film. He was Baby Face Nelson in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and can currently be seen playing famous English footballer Billy Bremner in The Damned United, opposite Michael Sheen.

The performances help carry the audience over some rough spots in the narration where the script (adapted from a novel entitled Outlaws) doesn’t supply quite enough information to let the audience know what’s happening. It’s one thing to give an audience a jolt of adrenaline by dropping them into an unfamiliar situation, as director Adrian Vitoria does with the opening heist. It’s another thing to skip past too many elements of plot information in scenes where you should be orienting the audience about who’s who and who wants what, as Vitoria does with the subsequent pub scene. I’m usually pretty resourceful when it comes to figuring out plot; so I consider it a bad sign when there’s a plot point that I don’t get until the director explains it in the commentary (it’s the routine with the cell phones – you’ll know it when you see it).

One thing The Crew doesn’t share with The Sopranos is the manner in which it ends. The Crew’s is very satisfying, even though it could almost be the start of another movie.



Video:

The Crew is framed at 1.85:1, except for the opening heist sequence, which has been matted to 2:35:1. Since there was no opportunity for a theatrical viewing, I have nothing to which to compare the Blu-ray presentation, but I suspect it looks more authentic than any projected film image, because the hi-def video image is being presented without any intermediate analog stage. All of the advantages of hi-def video are readily apparent: the remarkable detail, even in distant objects; the exceptional depth of field; an almost total absence of noise (since there was no scanning process to create any); excellent black levels. Other than the fact that this is a 1080i disc, how could anyone complain?

Watch me. There may be nothing to fault in the sheer accuracy of this disc, but if this is the direction for contemporary cinematography, I’m not going to pretend to enjoy it. The cinematography of The Crew is a perfect example of what film lovers should fear: the film as nature documentary. In terms of look, if not subject matter, this is a film that would be right at home on The Discovery Channel. The city of Liverpool, currently undergoing a renaissance of rebuilding after decades of urban blight, is a fascinating and varied environment, and as the characters of The Crew wander through it, it’s presented with all the sensitivity and poetry of a National Geographic team documenting an exotic habitat. The entire production team could have benefitted from a course with Michael Mann and Dante Spinotti on the proper use of digital photography to express mood and enhance narrative. As the film stands, it’s a triumph of acting over imagery that the story works so well.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Image’s Blu-ray. As far as I can tell, the disc accurately presents the film, and one can’t ask more.



Audio:

The DTS-HD MA soundtrack provides a nice sense of urban ambiance and handles the film’s generic pop/brooding soundtrack effectively. Dialogue is delivered clearly, but this may be small comfort to those struggling with the thick regional accents. (The subtitles are always there to help.) It is a serviceable but otherwise unremarkable track.



Special Features:

Commentary by director Adrian Vitoria and actors Scot Williams and Kenny Doughty. As often happens when there are multiple participants, there’s a tendency to banter. But these are serious people who care about their work, and they always return to the subject. Williams is by far the most interesting, because his knowledge of Liverpool is both deep and broad, and he clearly enjoys sharing it. Doughty, whose character is one of the most violent in the film, talks about both the allure and the challenge of playing such a role. Vitoria is remarkably laid back for a director; if this is his style on the set, actors must love him.

The Making of The Crew (29:20) (HD). Loaded with spoilers, this is not your usual EPK. The bulk of it consists of in-depth interviews with actors Williams, Doughty, Fellner and Bugeja about their characters’ backgrounds and motivations. All four are articulate and thoughtful. There is additional interview footage with director Vitoria and producer Ian Brady about the history of the production and the decision to shoot in Liverpool. The end of the documentary is very funny, as the off-screen interviewer presses a number of the subjects to state the “moral” of the film, and their struggles are edited together in rapid-fire succession.

25 Days of Making (6:06) (WS but SD res.). An entertaining montage of on-set and on-location production footage.

Deleted Scenes (19:53) (HD). There are thirteen scenes. Most of them are extended or alternate versions of scenes included in the finished film, and it’s noteworthy how many of these clarify plot points that are left for the audience to figure out with these scenes removed or shortened. In at least one instance (a key conversation between Ratter and his sidekick, Paul), the deleted scene would have better oriented the audience at a critical early juncture in the film, when viewers are still trying to get their bearings.

Trailer (HD). What’s most interesting about the trailer is the radically different color scheme on display. With features shot on film, this usually reflects the fact that trailers are made before a film has been fully edited and color-timed. But in this situation, given the HD video origins, this trailer clearly represents someone’s idea of a promotional effort to sell the film with a certain “look”. (Either that, or the concept of the film’s visuals changed radically during post-production.) It’s interesting to imagine how the film might have played if the visual approach used in the trailer had been applied throughout.



In Conclusion:

Despite my reservations about the visual style, I enjoyed The Crew, but I’m an acknowledged Anglophile. Then again, so is my wife, and she didn’t last half an hour. So there you have it – in the language of At the Movies, one “see it” and one “skip it”. If you decide to see it, this Blu-ray will provide an excellent representation (and, to boot, a pretty good travelogue).




Equipment used for this review:

Panasonic BDP-BD50 Blu-ray player (DTS-HD MA decoded internally and output as analog)
Samsung HL-T7288W DLP display (connected via HDMI)
Lexicon MC-8 connected via 5.1 passthrough
Sunfire Cinema Grand amplifier
Monitor Audio floor-standing fronts and MA FX-2 rears
Boston Accoustics VR-MC center
SVS SB12-Plus sub