ANN ARBOR, Mich. (U-WIRE) — Apparently, the unfortunate sons of mafia bosses have little to look forward to outside of following in their fathers’ footsteps. No respectable business will take you on as an employee, no matter how straight-edged you might appear. No future seems bright, and even the gangster life has faded significantly since its heyday because of snitches and the FBI.
Without the experience of their predecessors, all they can hope for is the life of a “knockaround guy” — a gopher. That life, just like this movie, is drab, monotonous and completely stripped of the glory that it could have been.
Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper) has it rough. As the son of infamous crime family leader Benny “Chains” Demaret (Dennis Hopper), he can neither get the sports managing job he desires nor become a legitimate part of the family. His friends, as it seems, all have similar predicaments. Taylor Reese (Vin Diesel) can never be a part of the mafia due to his Jewish religion, Johnny Marbles (Seth Green) is a screw-up who nobody trusts and Chris Scarpa (Andrew Davoli) lives the legitimate life after his father was freed from prison. Nothing fits for any of them.
After some pleading, “Chains” gives his son a job. It is so simple that it would take effort to err. Of course, Matty makes Johnny the main player in the action, foreshadowing the certainty of mistakes, and the action takes off from there.
“Knockaround Guys” has a very interesting premise that has inherent meaning for the next generation of adults moving up into the business world. This idea of disenchantment could have worked almost as a powerful antithesis to popular gangster films.
However, the writer/director/producer team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien drag the intriguing nature of the story deep into blandness. It seems as though after the majesty of their first co-written screenplay “Rounders,” this pair ran out of interesting material for their second attempt. Directing and producing didn’t help — a flat script, insipid characters and absence of style contribute to their problem.
The characters are extremely one-dimensional and stereotypical, as if Koppelman and Levien had mixed and matched from past gangster movies. Performances of equipped and capable actors suffer from lack of motivation and direction. Although Diesel has some bright moments and Malkovich is always a pleasure to watch, their acting is hampered by the stiffness of their characters and by poor direction.
Most problematic is the film’s lack of a defined tone. While it begins as a serious story, it develops into a cross-genre mess with attempts at humor, and it climaxes back to a serious, action-driven cliche.
Maybe with practice, Koppelman and Levien will evolve into an interesting team. This sour failure of a first attempt, however, is one film that should be forgotten rather
than used for development. “Knockaround Guys” proves to be a movie that could have been.