When the subject of exceptional gangster movies is brought up, a few films immediately pop into the mind: "Godfather I" and II, "Goodfellas," "Scarface" and now "Knockaround Guys."
All right, so I'm lying. It's not just a little white lie either, because far from being great, "Knockaround Guys" is closer to being a total disaster.
The main problem with "Knockaround Guys" is that the characters are shallow and arouse no sympathy. Besides not caring about what happens to any of the characters, the movie suffers from a slow plot and numerous inane bits of exposition that never seem to end. All of these flaws add up to a box office bomb.
The film begins with a young Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper) faltering at the request of his uncle Teddy Deserve (John Malkovich) to execute a traitor to the family. Thankfully, Uncle Teddy is understanding and tells Matty that it's OK, he's just not cut out for it.
After this scene, the film flashes forward to many years later when Matty is trying to get a job as a sports agent, while also maintaining his loose ties to the "family" business by being in charge of getting the sandwiches for lunch.
But now after yet another failed job interview, Matty gets fed up with living on his dad's money and doing nothing. Yeah, life is tough. It seems like he's living a fantasy life, and should be quite happy being rich just for picking up sandwiches.
But Matty never has been respected by his father or treated as a man, and right after an interview rejection, Matty is more than ready to give up on his dreams of becoming a sports agent. He jumps into the family business.
His father, chillingly named Benny "Chains" Demaret (Dennis Hopper), is fully against this and tells Matty he's not cut out for the business -- that people only get into it to survive. Matty replies, "Yeah. Well I need it to survive." I'm still thinking about that one, because Matty is clearly quite well off without doing anything.
After Benny initially rejects his son's plea, Uncle Teddy eventually puts in a few good words, and so Benny ultimately puts Matty in charge of a simple job to do. Well, at least a job he thought would be simple.
Another mystifying aspect of this movie is how this supposedly simple job suddenly takes on life and death implications during the middle of the movie. The stakes are inexplicably heightened, so far so that Benny needs the money in the bag within 48 hours or he is going to be killed. How did a simple job become such a huge crisis within a day? I don't know, and I don't think the filmmakers do either.
The first problem with this simple plan occurs at the outset, when Matty decides that his coke addict buddy, John Marbles (Seth Green), is a great choice to fly his own personal plane to Montana to pick up the bag, and bring it back. Now of course he's Seth Green, and a coke addict, and so of course he will fail, and he does so in spectacular fashion. Quite simply, he puts the bag down by other luggage and watches as it is taken away.
Interestingly enough, this theme of giving up is carried out throughout the movie, which also is puzzling since in most movies the characters want something. But in this movie, most of them just want to give up and go home.
After hearing of the lost bag, Matty leads a couple stock characters -- by which I mean friends -- out to Montana to meet up with John and find the bag. The friends are his cousin Chris Scarpa (Andrew Davoli), an Italian smooth talker who gets all the ladies, and the enforcer, Taylor Reese (Vin Diesel).
Once out in Montana, these New York City boys get a taste of the country life, forced to deal with the rowdy and drunk townies and the cunning and greedy town sheriff (Tom Noonan) in order to get Benny's cash back.
When the boy's efforts don't quite cut it, Uncle Teddy comes out with a couple other "family" members to set things straight.
Ultimately it seems that nothing of import ever happens in this movie. The plot moves slowly, the exposition is on the nose and painful to listen to at many points. The film's obligatory rousing speech scene involves Vin Diesel having a moment with Pepper and telling him he should, "Get a job, and be a good citizen, man." Well that inspiring speech, coupled with the melancholy soundtrack, almost made me cry, man.
There aren't too many redeeming qualities in this movie. Malkovich is fun to watch, but his character is fairly static. Pepper excels at being a character I could care less about. And all Johnny and Chris want to do is give up. I suppose the only fun things are watching Vin Diesel destroying a store with a crowbar, beating a townie up and watching all the characters trying to hold back from smacking Green in the face. Besides that, this movie has nothing of any interest, and fittingly enough, it's already on its way out of theaters.
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