"Knockaround Guys" starts with a bang and ends in a bang. This movie had more guns and violence than Vin Diesel's last movie "XXX," which can only equal fun for the masses.
Barry Pepper, Diesel, Seth Green, John Malkovich, Andrew Davoli and Dennis Hopper star in the New Line Cinema drama "Knockaround Guys," written and directed by Brian Koppleman and David Levien.
The movie starts with Teddy (Malkovich) and Benny (Hopper) playing two shady mob bosses in Brooklyn. They are having issues collecting money from under bosses safely, what with the feds always lurking. Benny's son, Matty (Pepper), is having his own issues - namely, trouble getting a job because of his father's mob relations.
Running out of options and sick of getting rejected from job after job, Matty decides that he wants to work for his father as a last resort. Teddy, interested in helping his son, persuades Benny to allow Matty to do a job for the family: the retrieval of $500,000 from an under boss in Washington.
The plan goes wrong when Matty decided to allow Johnny Marbles (Green), a sketched out coke addict, fly the money back to Brooklyn from Washington. In a paranoid episode, Marbles leaves the money at a remote airport in Montana. Desperate to get the money and complete the job, Matty gathers some close friends, Taylor Reese and Chris Scarpa (Diesel and Davoli, respectively), to recover the lost the money and return it to his father in Brooklyn.
The young mobsters, sporting attitudes and black clothing, enter the town. They parade around the local hotspots asking questions and demanding information, and the story quickly becomes incredibly violent - and fun - culminating in an ending that is both interesting and twisted.
"Knockaround Guys" would be worth the ticket price, if only for the action. Adding in Malkovich, whose acting is top notch as usual, and Diesel, whose bully role as a lackey for Matty was great to see. He's practically the sole reason why this movie was released in the first place. New Line has kept it on the shelf for the past three years, but apparently Vin Diesel's new-found marketability has rendered the film a viable product. Or perhaps not: the film made a measly $5 million at the box office last week.
Although aspects of the movie are thin - why would a long-standing mob boss allow his son and his son's slacker friends to pick up $500,000? - what Koppelman and Levien's film lacks in creativity it makes up for with action.
