“Knockaround Guys,” written and directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien (“Rounders”), had all the elements of a successful action movie: the opportunity (given the popularity of mob movies), the allure (with its new twist of the second-generation Mafiosi trying to prove their capabilities to their parents) and the cast (with established vets John Malkovich and Dennis Hopper and rising stars Seth Green, Vin Diesel and Barry Pepper).
Something must have been knocked around in the year of postproduction and half a year of release delays, because this movie just is not good.
Matty Demaret (Pepper, “The Green Mile”) has been nothing but a flunky to his boss father, Benny “Chains” (Hopper, “Speed”), since he failed a significant business-related mission.
Eventually, because “Chains” has fallen on hard times, he agrees to let Johnny Marbles (Green, “Can’t Hardly Wait”), an amateur pilot, fly across the country to pick up a half-million-dollar loan and transport it back to New York; Pepper will supervise the deal.
When everything goes wrong, Matty calls in his friends to retrieve the stolen money from the corrupt sheriff (Tom Noonan, “The Pledge”). The New York mobsters set out as brothers to get what belongs to them.
The characters in this are just not lovable. None of them draws the line between hero and villain well enough for the movie’s plot to be the slightest bit interesting. And worse, in such a one-sided movie, in which the viewer has to imagine the sheriff as the dumbest man ever to think of messing with these kids, some sort of balance is deeply needed, if only to make the movie a little surprising.
Between Malkovich’s apparent speech impediment and Diesel’s delayed-speech pattern, the sheriff should have been able to hijack their plane and fly to, well, somewhere far away. Vin Diesel’s best acting, as in “XXX,” is when he gets to be funny in a dull-witted, guy-with-no-neck kind of way.
But here, he is just the big star that the producers needed to sell the movie. Hopper does not seem to care about his small role, and his scenes are rushed and short-lived.
Worse yet, the characters are locked in a movie that never knows what tone it wants to strike. Koppelman and Levien take great pains to make the picture funny at times, and you can feel every grunt and groan of their creative process.
However, they also try to suffuse it with darkness, and they are not skillful enough to navigate those kinds of tone shifts. When one character dies brutally, he is lucky to get a few bars of Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” on the soundtrack. But the movie is off and running in another direction before we have even had a few minutes to allow the incident to settle.
With the only chemistry between these young leads resembling a frat trying to put on a play, and little support from the skilled veterans who have a hard enough time themselves, this movie is left to the directors who also need help — as in “Rounders,” in which Norton and Damon really held the movie together.
It is a bit sad even that a movie about family could have been so much better had their been some familial helpfulness among the ensemble.
