Knockaround Guys (2001) **

For Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper), life should be pretty good. As the son of a mobster, Matty has plenty of money, a fancy car, and few responsibilities. What he lacks is respect, both self-respect and the respect of his father. Matty really wants to break away from the family business and live a straight life, but no one will hire the son of the notorious “Benny Chains.” (Dennis Hopper)

Resigned to making his career as a mobster, Matty convinces his dad to entrust him with retrieving a bag of cash from across the country. Matty stupidly dispatches his hapless pilot friend Johnny (Seth Green), who naturally screws it up, losing the bag of cash at a small, Montana airport during a fuel stop. Desperate to retrieve the money to save face and save his father, who is counting on the cash, Matty leaves Brooklyn for Montana, with a couple of friends in tow (including Vin Diesel). In Montana, these fish out of water have to contend with skater punks, local yahoos, and a shady sheriff, not to mention pressure from Matty's father and uncle (John Malkovich).

This is a perfectly good setup with an excellent cast, so it's puzzling why the film is so lackluster. I think the first problem is that all the good actors are playing the Brooklyn Mafia guys, leaving the local Montanan roles to underperform. The skater punks are supposed to be funny, Jay-and-Silent-Bob types, and the sheriff is supposed to be a menacing, Brian Dennehy-from-”First Blood” character, but none of the actors can pull it off. The other problem just comes down to bad writing. In one scene after another, these characters do what makes the least amount of sense. In one scene, for example, Vin Diesel's character is about to get into a bar fight, when he says “500,” then launches into a long-winded monolog about how that's how many street fights he's been in, or maybe how many he aspires to. It's not even clear, because the scene is so poorly-written. You could use this movie in film school as an example of what not to do as a screenwriter.

“Knockaround Guys” is basically a mess right up until the climactic showdown, at which point it gets kind of cool, but then it degenerates right back into a hackneyed mess. The movie was panned by critics and ignored by audiences, actually losing money, which is remarkable considering the top-shelf cast. It probably didn't help that it came out right around the 9/11 attacks, but honestly, this movie deserved to fail. If John Malkovich and Dennis Hopper didn't fire their agents for getting them into this, they are nicer than I am.

2 stars out of 5