KNOCKAROUND GUYS

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, October 11, 2002

KNOCKAROUND GUYS gets away with a lot, even when it doesn't quite work. A mixture of droll comedy and violent, eventually dead-serious crime drama, the movie doesn't entirely have control of its shifts in tone, but even so, most of its separate parts are highly entertaining.

Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper) wants to be a New York sports agent. The problem is, everybody has heard of Matty's dad, the near-legendary Benny "Chains" Demaret (Dennis Hopper), a major player in organized crime, with the consequence that Matty is viewed as an untouchable who will surely bring the mob in on any job he gets. Matty has long been viewed as too soft for the family business (as a child, he refused to shoot a man), but when no one else will hire him, he decides he might as well do what's expected of him hoping to win his father's respect in the process and offers to supervise a money run.

The task seems simple enough get a duffle bag filled with several hundred thousand dollars in cash from Spokane back to New York City but Benny is dubious that Matty's childhood pal, the sometimes drug-addled Marbles (Seth Green), can pull it off. Sure enough, Marbles manages to lose the bag at a stopover in a tiny Montana town. Matty, realizing that if the money isn't recovered both his father and Marbles will likely be killed, desperately organizes a secret retrieval squad consisting of himself and his friends Scarpa (Andrew Davoli), another mob scion judged unable to handle Family responsibilities, and Taylor (Vin Diesel), an enforcer unlikely to be promoted due to his ethnicity. They join Marbles in Montana, confident that their city smarts will prevail in this backwater, unaware of who's in possession of the bag.

This last

turns out to be one of KNOCKAROUND GUYS' better jokes, a plot twist that for awhile seems like it may take the movie into some other genre altogether. Directors/writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien show a gift for stoner teen comedy and likewise have some startling, pure dramatic moments there's a shot of a young man, aware he's about to die, simply breathing on the ground and listening to his own respiration that is very effective. They even have a few good tonal segues, where scenes that start out being wryly funny turn persuasively perilous with great speed.

However, GUYS sometimes misjudges its transitions. The filmmakers are not as adroit at mixing comedy and drama as they are with one or the other, so that scenes where a character is off-hand in the midst of calamity or becomes glum in an absurd situation give off a whiff of self-parody and the ending has a touch of formula to it. Even so, the storyline keeps us surprised and engaged there's a spirit of genuine invention at work.

The cast are all very good, with Pepper exuding decency and tension, Diesel doing fine as a tough guy with a loyal heart and Green topnotch as a realistically addled doper (think Sean Penn's Spicoli on coke but still mellow). Hopper and John Malkovich project sly malevolence and Tom Noonan is outstanding as the local sheriff with some very idiosyncratic ideas about right and wrong.

KNOCKAROUND GUYS won't be mistaken for a Quentin Tarantino knockoff it commits itself fully to being goofy in its comedy and is wholehearted in its drama, even at the cost of looking unhip. Its blend of sensibilities is sometimes very uneven, but enough of it works to stick with you afterwards.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think at feedback@cinescape.com.