The film buff in me conjured up Satyajit Ray, one of the handful of cinema's all-time greatest directors, while watching the failed high-concept thriller KREWS on cable recently. This unreleased film is typical of the so-called "indie" film movement, which has opened up endless possibilities to screw up in our post-Factory System movie world.
In recent years the thriller genre has been dominated (apart from the interloping psychological horror movies) by big-budget "thrill rides", typified by the successful Jason Bourne entries. So for itinerant filmmakers working on a modest budget, one has to focus on intense interpersonal conflict and war of wills for the thrills.
Director Hilbert Hakim, debuting in the helmer's chair after amassing innumerable 2nd a.d. credits on a variety of projects, is unfortunately saddled with an unworkable script by Joshua Leibner. JL's thematic intentions are lofty, but the twists and turns to keep this pot boiling are so unconvincing it takes massive suspensions of disbelief to keep watching. Back in the bad old Golden Age days, script conferences and endless rewrites (now called "tampering with one's vision") could have molded this into the semblance of an engrossing B-movie, but intacto Leibner's writing is a joke.
Title refers to gangster lingo for "the boys", contrasting a high-tech, white-collar crime duo dealing in tens of millions of dollar transactions, vs. a crew of Black drug dealers. Brian Geraghty and Jonathan Cake are impressive as the "fishes out of water" big shots, stuck in a Ghetto environment trying to survive the night after they're carjacked by incompetent criminals Ty Hodges and Sam Jones III.
SPOILERS ALERT:
The first of many phony twists comes about when Cake kills a police officer who has saved him & Geraghty. Cake is shot in the shoulder and almost suddenly the second unsupportable twist has him & Geraghty joining forces with their surviving kidnapper (Jones), who offers to get Cake private medical attention in return for $5,000. Hodges is killed in the police incident, and some extraneous mayhem by both the cop and Cake is thrown in, further ruining this early, pivotal scene. I stuck with the film, but many viewers would turn the channel at this point (or walk out of the theater had KREWS warranted a theatrical release).
They hole up with Jones' lovely sister who has studied medicine, and the gimmicks start piling up annoyingly at an accelerated pace. Nobody likes each other, and the inverted conventions of THE DESPERATE HOURS don't play well at all. Instead of being a house invader, Geraghty remains (almost) Mr. Nice Guy, until a truly phony "twist" of him being a dirty double-dealer all along is revealed near the end, rendering his previous unconvincing behavior to be a mere red herring.
This toying with the audience's sympathies is de rigeur in modern movies, but the old '30s and '40s formulas worked because they were believable. Throwing in illogical behavior and dumb motivations just to amuse the audience torpedoes any hope that KREWS will coalesce into a convincing narrative.
Hakim encourages his ensemble to overact (which fits the hyper-nature of the story), but frequently overdoes the set of Black stereotypes that have dominated this area of cinema since the influential BOYS N THE HOOD debuted (I even saw KREWS relegated to a cable TV ghetto on the Starz in Black channel). Even so, the actors do a bang-up job, ranging from Geraghty's sneaky performance and Cake's bravura turn to solid support by hood Charles Malik Whitfield, Jones and Faune Chambers as the tough lady of the house. Even smaller roles, like Charles Robinson as a no-nonsense neighbor who at first helps Geraghty but later takes out his frustrations on him (a mini-pistol-whip), are well handled. But it all goes back to the script, always the weak link in cinema, where of late "visionary directors" have taken over the madhouse.
Satyajit Ray practically invented the third-world cinema "formula" in the '50s of people in strange environments coping, ranging from his Apu Trilogy of small town/metropolis contrasts to his great (but unsung) business world films like Company Ltd. and The Middleman. He could have made something of Leibner's heavy-handed examination of our current class system, and perhaps even probed the psychology of these money-grubbing types from such different backgrounds. Cake takes the spotlight briefly with a fabulous put-down monologue about "the food chain" near the end of the film, but his quality acting gets lost in the overly-plotted shuffle, as the wounded Cake becomes merely a punching bag for his Black adversary Whitfield.
