Disorganized Crime

Summoned by bank robber Frank Salazar (Corbin Bernsen), four career crims descend on a small town for a job. Herman Munster is the electronics and explosives expert, Ruben Blades is the edgy Latino with the guns, Lou Diamond Philips the actor desperate for a new hit role and William Russ is the guy who looks like Dale Midkiff but can’t act as well. Together they are super criminals extraordinaire, the infamous Banditos El Robbo De Nacho!

I lie. They’re just plain old everyday scumbags, sorry, I mean thieves, and the catch is they don’t even know each other.

Arriving at the predetermined hideout they discover Salazar has been pinched by the cops, but still holding true to all the values they hold dear they determine to go ahead with the job, which is knocking over the local bank for a cool half a million gummy bears, which is criminal slang for saying lots of lollies.

So far so easy, it’s a simple story, yet it drags on and nothing memorable happens. The story has a vaguely empty feeling very early on, a portent, it turns out, of things to come.

Cutting into the action of our team setting up the score are bumbling big city cops (Al Bundy and someone who could possibly be his younger and uglier brother, if that’s possible) who catch then lose Salazar, and then spend the rest of the film hunting for him while almost, but not quite, inadvertently catching our heroes in their bank job.

Slow in getting going, then long in getting to the point, Disorganized Crime spends much too much time setting up silly scenarios which allow the gradual breaking down of the characters initial distrust for each other and eventual coming together as a well oiled and functional team to pull off the job they were hired for. The problem is we aren’t given any reason to care for whether they like each other or not, in fact their best scenes are when they’re at each others throats.

"Why don’t you just kick me in the nuts?"

Well, even though it's Ruben Blades who says that at one point to Fred Gwynne, it might as well have been me saying it to the screen, so drawn out did the story feel. It is also hampered by scenes which either play out too long or two short, such as overlong panic when the safehouse seems to come under fire from cops, or the too brief bank job given short shrift after a way too long build up of preparing for the night.

And don’t be fooled into thinking that Bernsen gets a major role here, as he spends the majority of his time on the run in what amounts to a bit part in a subplot which focuses more on the bumbling antics of Bundy and Co. digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole, not wanting to admit they’ve been given the slip by a crim in a small hick town.

Disorganized Crime plays out like a disorganised idea, and you’ll most likely forget what you’ve watched five minutes after turning the telly off.

The 97 minutes plays out over a single layer so it’s free of a layer change, which is good, so that’s a nice start. Yep, then again it means you don’t get a .37 second break from the film, so it has a price. The 1.85:1 print is 16:9 enhanced and isn’t one of the better I’ve seen lately. Colours are dull, with nothing standing out as remotely close to strong, artistic choice or not. The picture feels flat, not helped by the lack of depth in the shadow regions. It’s also grainy and less than revealing in detail, looking aged for its years.

The catchiest thing about this film is the score by David Newman, who has worked on quite a list of films in his career, some good, some very bad, some utter shit. While you’ve probably heard the style before (probably by him), it has this neat harmonica and twangy guitar sound that hooks you. Too bad the film can’t live up to the score then, isn’t it? The rest of the Dolby Digital 5.1 track is reasonable, even if the dialogue distorts a bit when someone farts. Did I say fart? Silly me. I meant when someone shouts. Things get a little tinny and hollow sounding as well here and there, and the whole 5.1ness is a bit wasted on it, but there’s nothing here which is gonna have you throwing beans at your screen.

Break it up people, there’s nothing to look at in here except a really basic menu designed by someone who really believed in the concept of white space, except here it's black space. Go back to your homes.

No surprises to find this DVD is another cheapo release building up the catalogue of Region 4 titles, and can be had for under 15 bucks. If you look in the right shops it can probably be found for three bucks, but you have to return it after two nights. If you’re really careful you could probably just steal it, and if you’re caught blame Hollywood for teaching you that crime pays.