A situational cross between Hitchcock's LIFEBOAT and Polanski's KNIFE IN THE WATER, THE CREW is an ineffective and pointless exercise in tedium.
Writer Bill (Donal Logue) and wife Jennifer (Pam Gidley), join her brother Phillip (Viggo Mortensen), a lawyer, on his yacht for a day trip in the Caribbean. Also aboard are rock-musician Alex (John Philbin) and medical-student Catherine (Sam Jenkins). On the open sea, they rescue two people from
a burning boat--transsexual Timothy (Jeremy Sisto) and the woman he is smuggling into the country, Camilla (Laura del Sol). Timothy quickly commandeers the vessel, and deposits his hostages on an island beach while he waits for help from his lover. Oddly, Bill is sympathetic toward his captor, and
helps Timothy thwart Phillip's efforts to retake the yacht, but Phillip does succeed in disabling it. When it's obvious Timothy's lover has spurned him, Bill tries to prevent the jilted sex-change from committing suicide, but Phillip shoots and kills him anyway. Then Bill and Camilla take off in
the life raft, leaving the others behind.
It's hard to believe someone could write a script with basically only seven characters and fail to give any one of them any personality. Potentially explosive revelations like Jennifer and Alex being lovers, Catherine's prostitution career, and Phillip's involvement with drug dealers aren't even
interesting, much less meaningful in any way. The conflict between Bill, Phillip, and Timothy is supposed to parallel Bill's failure to stop his mother (Grace Zabriskie) from committing suicide in the film's prologue, viewers will likely not care about any of this. THE CREW is, simply,
stupefyingly boring. (Profanity, violence, adult situations.) leave a comment
