Al's on a losing streak

Rene Russo: watchable

Two For The Money is a vehicle for Al Pacino, and whether you like the movie will depend upon how warmly or otherwise you respond to Pacino when he's dominating the screen with his particular style of frenzied overacting. He just made me feel tired.

Little Al acts - and boy, does he act - as Walter Abrams, a New York-based
sports-betting mogul who has more-or-less overcome his own addiction to gambling by profiting from the gambling addiction of others.

He recruits a personable young man (Matthew McConaughey) who has a formidable skill at predicting the outcome of American football matches, and grooms him to become a taller, smoother version of himself.

As a glimpse of a seedy side of American life that's worth around two billion dollars a year, Two For The Money has its fascinations.

The film also has resonance in the way it sees gambling and selling oneself as central to the American Dream.

Where it never catches fire is in the development of a romantic triangle between the two leading men and Walter Abram's gorgeous beautician wife (Rene Russo).

Russo is always watchable, but the script - by her real-life husband, Dan Gilroy - gives her little to work with, and the character's murky past as a junkie is referred to, but never developed.

More fatally still, neither Gilroy nor director D.J. Caruso seems quite aware of just how sleazy a character Walter Abrams is, and how dislikeable his mentoring makes McConaughey.

It's impossible to care much about any of these parasites, and Pacino's hectoring becomes more and more irritating as the film progresses into its second hour (it runs for an unnecessarily long 122 minutes).

By the end, I was just wishing that he would shut up. I would lay good odds against this movie being a hit.

Two For The Money
Cert: cert15

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