This is a crime family drama with good acting, decent action, and a script that holds your interest. Matty (Barry Pepper) is the son of crime boss Benny Chains (Dennis Hopper). Benny is in business with his brother Teddy (John Malkovich). Because of Matty being part of a known crime family, he can't get honest employment. He seeks to earn the trust of his father and do important tasks.

When the opportunity arises to please his father, Matty employs his coke snorting paranoid friend Marbles (Seth Green) to make a run out to Spokane to pick up a bag...which gets lost in a small town in Montana. The gang which includes Vin "I've been in 500 fights" Diesel goes there to get it back...but who has it?

The film moves along at a good pace. Not Malkovich's most convincing tough guy, Vin Diesel makes up for it.

Parental Guide: F-bomb, no sex, no nudity.

What you have here is a film about four wanna-be gangsters with only one real badass among them. But even Vin Diesel gets to be touchy feely near the end of the picture when he commiserates with Matty Demaret (Barry Pepper) about a life of crime. The story line is only somewhat credible, in as much as Matty's bunch high tails it to Montana to find Johnny Marbles (Seth Green) sitting next to his plane, having lost track of a duffel bag with a half mil in it. Think about that for a sec, the boys have to book a flight from New York to Montana and get there in no time at all, forget about making connections to a small podunk town like Wibaux. Once there they have to contend with a corrupt sheriff (Tom Noonan) who has designs of his own on the five hundred grand, minus five thousand in play money the nitwit potheads wound up spending.

This pretty much plays out the way one would expect it to, as Uncle Teddy (John Malkovich) heads in from back East to lend a helping hand with his sidekick thugs. What I didn't expect was for Ted to come gunning for his own nephew Matty, even if his friend Johnny Marbles had to go out the hard way. The showdown at the finale would have done an old time B Western proud, but for that you'll have to catch the picture. The only thing I was left wondering was how a big time underboss like Benny Chains (Dennis Hopper) never figured out his own brother was skimming off the top.

It's getting harder and harder to find a good mob movie these days. Everyone loves the Sopranos, I've heard it over and over (though I have not had the good fortune to see it myself, as of yet.) However, Sopranos or no, I think this movie deserves better recognition.

There was real chemistry with this cast. There is no denying John Malkovich on screen (sorry if I spelled that wrong),but the most surprising performance, for me, was in Vin Diesel.

Yes, I've seen XXX and Fast and the Furious. I confess, I even own them. So sue me. I know the scripts he gets and the lines he throws out. But something about Diesel's presence more than his actions in this movie convinced me more than anyone else. He was charismatic, loyal, a believable streetfighter. By the end, I was on the edge of my seat just hoping Taylor (Diesel) would survive!

Not the best movie ever to come out, but not something to be rejected either. If your in the mood for a good movie on "The Life," rent The Knockaround Guys. It's a satisfying ride. My rating: 7 1/2 stars.