Brian Koppleman and David Levien's fusty Mafia drama doesn't look half bad, on paper. It's a "sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons" tale about the privileged scions of a group of Mafia dons who find it impossible to make it in the straight world of New York by virtue of their last names. Barry Pepper (a Campbell River lad last seen in We Were Soldiers) is Matty Demaret, son of Benny "Chains" Demaret (Dennis Hopper), a leading Mafia boss. University educated and with a desire to become a sports agent, Matty finds the employment door slamming shut as soon as people find out who his father is. Along with his Brooklyn buddies Chris Scarpa (Andrew Davoli) and Johnny Marbles (Seth Green), Matty decides that it is time to give up the idea of living the straight life and join the family business.

Enlisting the aid of his dad's lieutenant Teddy Deserve (John Malkovich), Matty convinces pop to give him the chance he deserves. "Okay," says Benny. "Go retrieve a bag of money from some people in Seattle." It all goes downhill from here both for the movie and the destinies of Matty and his buddies.

That Matty would send Marbles, the least competent of his buddies and the only one with a known coke problem, to fetch the bag is ludicrous plot hole number one. That Marbles would, of course, lose the bag is cliché number one. That he would lose it in a small, mid-western town that is everything that New York isn't-well that's mildly interesting. The stage is set for Matty and his buddies, along with muscleman Taylor Reese (Vin Diesel, whose character should have been the one called "Marbles" because he talks like he's got a mouth full of them) to head west and retrieve the money. Many deaths ensue.

Along with the plot holes, clichés and Diesel's irksome mumbling, the film also has a reprehensible theme. In the opening scene, the 12-year-old Matty is given the chance to kill the man who informed on his father. He can't pull the trigger. Despite all assertions to the contrary by his father and Malkovich's Teddy, the implication is that Matty ain't got what it takes.

Throughout the film, Matty is essentially trying to prove to his father that he's a man, and in the end, he has done so. How? By discovering a traitor and then killing him in a shoot-out. There's a progressive life lesson for you: In order to become a real man, you must kill a real man... That was a dubious proposition back in the days of Homer and it is nothing less than disgusting in our times.