Crackers **½ (1984, Donald Sutherland, Jack Warden, Sean Penn, Wallace Shawn) – Classic Movie Review 11,412

Director Louis Malle’s 1984 crime caper film Crackers is a lightweight comedy thriller about a group of bungling safecrackers who try to pull off a heist on a San Francisco pawnbroker’s store. The small-time thieves are led by the unemployed Weslake (Donald Sutherland) and attempt to rob the local pawn shop owned by the greedy Garvey (Jack Warden).

If the plot seems familiar, it is because this movie is an American revision of Mario Monicelli’s rather more polished and expert 1958 Italian comedy thriller I Soliti Ignoti [Persons Unknown], which was set and filmed in Rome. Miscast director Malle has assembled the right cast for oddball fun, but more wit in the script by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin would give it a needed shot in the arm.

The fine star team of Donald Sutherland, Jack Warden, Sean Penn and Wallace Shawn give reliable, well-honed turns that help to make it palatable if not tasty.

It is remade again as the 2002 Welcome to Collinwood (set in Cleveland).

Also in the cast are Larry Riley, Trinidad Silva, Irwin Corey, Charlaine Woodard, Trinidad Silva, Christine Baranski, Tasia Valenzia, Edouard DeSoto, Anna Marie Horsford, and Mitchell Lichtenstein.

Unlike it illustrious predecessor, it flopped. Costing $12 million, it took $129,268 at the box office.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,412

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