Plunk four young Brooklyn mobsters down in a honky tonk town in rural Montana.

Make the stakes a bag of mob cash worth $500,000. Dump the money into the hands of two thrill-seeking potheads. Turn the local cops crooked. Get the town toughs involved. Bring in the bosses from New York.

Now you have a movie called Knockaround Guys.

Written and directed by long-time friends Brian Koppelman and David Levien (who collaborated on the script for Rounders), Knockaround Guys is a Far West, fish-out-of-water version of GoodFellas (in spirit, not literally).

The four are good friends back in New York. One is a slick trickster (Barry Pepper) who would rather go legit. But his career plans are scuttled because of the family business: His father (Dennis Hopper) is a high level mob boss and his uncle (John Malkovich) is the boss' hard-nosed lieutenant.

So our young anti-hero, and his James Dean posturing, is handed a mission: Get that bag of cash from Seattle to New York without attracting the feds. When everything gets screwed up -- which is inevitable or there is no movie -- Pepper and his pals fly to Montana.

It's a motley crew. Pepper's best buddy is a street tough (Vin Diesel, in his last small support role, given his newfound stardom). Then there is another slick dude (Andrew Davoli) and the dude's coke-snorting cousin (Seth Green), the screw-up who gets them all in trouble in the first place.

Given the nature of movies, Koppelman and Levien quickly establish that we're supposed to root for the gangsters, especially when they encounter the redneck hicks and crooked cops and potheads. Logic and morality be damned, we root for the worst of the bad guys. They're the only ones we really get to know. And it's only a movie -- at least in this case because we know nothing is taken seriously.

Knockaround Guys has its moments. It's different. Pepper and Diesel have marvellous on-screen best-buddy chemistry, especially as opposites. Even in a small role as a hood, Diesel layers in street smarts and complex emotions.

MEDIOCRE

But the plot gets unhinged as doors open into the heart of the story. The final climax, and its family feud denouement, is so obvious in the concept and so silly in the execution. The movie, which started well, sells us out.

It does not help that Hopper (with his weird accent), Tom Noonan (as the cliched bad cop) and particularly Malkovich (mean and mad) are just so awful. Malkovich chews up so much scenery he starts spitting out splinters.

Of course, a lot more of that and Knockaround Guys could have become a cult classic. Instead, it's just mediocre.

(This film is rated AA)

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