TWO FOR THE MONEY
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
Pacino fans take note – Big Al does indeed chew up the scenery for a good two thirds of this film's running time. A running time that ends up overstaying its welcome. Director D.J.Caruso's (The Salton Sea/Taking Lives) Money is the (based on a true story) tale of Matthew McConaughey's Brandon Lang, a gifted college football player whose career is swiftly ended by a knee that gets bent too far in the wrong direction. Try as he might, Brandon cannot convince another team to give him a new shot no matter how much physical therapy he endures.
And so we find him in Las Vegas as he works automated phone lines in a cubicle-strewn dungeon. When asked to fill in for a football betting hotline, he decides to throw away the scripted picks and soon learns that he retains so much intimate knowledge about the world of college football that he can accurately guess eighty percent of the winning statistics. Soon enough this talent catches the attention of Pacino's Walter Abrams, a sports betting media mogul who suddenly calls like Morpheus and offers Brandon the red pill option of moving to Brooklyn to become his star protégé.
Others have noted that this looks like a cross between Devil's Advocate and Wall Street, but it winds up playing like a limp imitation that isn't as good as either of those films. It actually reminded me more of the excellent Giovanni Ribisi film Boiler Room, and instilled in me a desire to revisit that film. In Money, Brandon's family is vaguely introduced, only to be promptly forgotten except for a few scattered moments. The relationship with his father is featured prominently during the opening moments (Lang's sportsmanlike drive is fueled by the need to make his absentee papa proud), but this thread is shot down in flames by one of Pacino's more interesting speeches. Upon Brandon's discovery that Walter is secretly keeping his papa's incoming calls from him, a verbal altercation finds Pacino unloading with a Network-esque diatribe detailing how everybody on Earth is emotionally damaged and that Brandon's daddy issues don't matter at all. This could have been an intriguing subjugation of traditional story cliches, but why spend so much time in the beginning establishing this father-son relationship and then not carry through with it? Once again, the tortured father-son relations between Boiler Room's Ribisi and Ron Rifkin as his father are much stronger than anything on display here.
Not to say that the father-son dynamic is missing entirely, since Pacino is quick to establish himself as Brandon's new paternal figure. A quick talking lunatic with a potential bum ticker, Walter takes Lang under his wing, and rewrites his personality into an unctuous huckster named John Anthony while showing him the ropes of the sports betting community. He also introduces Brandon/John to his wife Toni, played by Rene Russo. We're asked to believe that there's an unspoken sexual tension linking these characters, but this imagined chemistry just doesn't click. The rest of the time we spend trying to muster an interest in seeing Brandon wrestle with the duality of his true nature and the newly minted Sleazenstein of John Anthony.
Luckily Pacino is at hand and is still ready to keep things rolling by spouting outrageous epithets for our benefit. One of the best early scenes involve Walter dragging Brandon to a bettors' anonymous meeting, wherein Pacino poses as a recovering gambling addict. He then gleefully informs everyone present that their real problem is that they're all born losers who aren't addicted to gambling, but rather the rush they experience when they flush their lives down the toilet. Eventually one of the group recognizes his face and the scam is revealed – Walt's simply there to hand out business cards to the junkies in case they feel like a good relapse. For such a deviant guy he somehow manages to keep on the correct side of the law despite charging percentages from the winnings of his clients. He even has a weekly cable show with two of his star pickers, one of whom is a woefully underused Jeremy Piven whose entire technique is based upon a computer program that he's created.
But John Anthony doesn't need an electronic gimmick. He can grab the winners out of thin air. Until suddenly, for no apparent reason other than to generate drama, he simply can't. No real explanation is given as to why his skills dry up. Possibly because he's gotten lost inside the vapid excesses of his new persona. Or perhaps he was merely lucky all this time and had never had a gift at all. The latter hypothesis is unlikely given the overemphasis on his superhuman abilities early in the story. Luckily for the plot, right before it all goes to shit, Armand Assante is introduced as a big time South American bettor named Novian who doesn't like anybody. Probably because he know's his character is a cipher. So needless to say he arrives at the right moment to demean and threaten Brandon and his family, who we're still supposed to care about despite their status as sub-plot paperweights. Brandon's greed also makes Walter bare his teeth over monetary shares, but once again this threat goes nowhere fast.
And so it all boils down one character's secret addiction and the nonexistant love triangle between Pacino, Russo and McConaughey. Mild events unfold, and we're left with a finale much akin to that in the film Play It To The Bone, where all three characters end up roughly in the same position they started in without having really learned anything. The story arcs are in essence story flatlines, and despite Al's great lines and the energized portions of the opening act, Two For the Money is one for Showtime. Or more likely the USA Network.