![]() ![]() ![]() But they also try to suffuse it with darkness, and they aren't skillful enough to navigate those kinds of tone shifts. 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. Worse yet, the characters are locked in a movie that never knows what tone it wants to strike. They're city boys in a cowboy burg, and the movie presses the point every chance it gets. In a gun store, they're waited on by a guy wearing an "Elk-a-holic" truckers' cap they have to ask a local who Brooks and Dunn are. That's the setup that brings these four city boys into a fresh, foreign environment, supposedly providing them with unexpected challenges, new chances to prove themselves and jukeboxes with tunes they've never heard before. Naturally enough, things go terribly wrong, and they just happen to go wrong in the little cow town of Wibaux, Mont. Eventually, because Hopper has fallen on hard times, he agrees to let Green, 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. He begs his father (Dennis Hopper, who chomps idly through his small role in the movie as if it were a pastrami sandwich) for a significant gig in the family business. Pepper's character has been nothing but a flunky since he failed a significant business-related mission at the age of 13. "Knockaround Guys," the pair's first picture as directors, is set in another underworld subculture: It's the story of four young men - played by Barry Pepper, Vin Diesel, Andrew Davoli and Seth Green - who have enjoyed privileged lives as the offspring of Brooklyn mobsters, but who have come to realize that they can't get any respect in either their fathers' world or the real one. The picture was written and directed by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who wrote the feeble 1998 "Rounders," which took place in the underworld of professional poker players. "Knockaround Guys" is one of those strained caper movies that's hardly any fun to watch and begins to vaporize from your memory minutes after it ends. ![]()
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