Movie Review: Two for the Money

Pacino turns to his bag of scenery-chomping bravado

Hoo-yah!

Ever since he hooted and blustered his way to an Oscar in 1992's Scent of a Woman, Al Pacino has run through an erratic string of roles in which he's played high-strung, scenery-chewing mentor to a handsome roster of overmatched younger actors.

.In Donnie Brasco, he was low-level mob capo to an undercover Johnny Depp. In Any Given Sunday he was hard-nosed coach to Jamie Foxx's flashy quarterback. In The Recruit he was barking mad CIA overseer for Colin Farrell's raw spy in training.

So the world-wearing Pacino hardly breaks a sweat as he takes the drawling, laid-back good-ol'-hunk Matthew McConaughey under his wing in Two for the Money, an overheated saga of testosterone dramatics that apparently aspires to be the "Wall Street" of big-time sports gambling.

But instead, under the lax director of D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives) and despite Pacino's flamboyant, over-the-top theatrics, it plays its hand as an uninvolving melodrama populated by a rogues' gallery of thoroughly unsympathetic, unlikable and morally bereft characters.

Two for the Money features McConaughey as Brandon Lang, a star college quarterback whose sure-fire pro career is cut short by a bone-crushing leg injury. Six years down the road, this former sports golden boy who still harbors hopes for an NFL tryout is laboring away as a salesman for a company that peddles 900 phone numbers.

When a colleague who makes picks for a sports-gambling hot line needs a substitute, Brandon is tapped to fill in and it turns out that he's a natural. When he posts an 80 percent success rate at picking football winners, he attracts the attention of Walter Abrams (Pacino), the high-rolling New York gambling impresario who runs a stable of handicappers out of a four-story brownstone.

Soon, Walter, who nurses a weak ticker and repressed gambling addiction, adopts Brandon as his protege and begins to show him the ins and outs of big-money sports betting.

Inevitably, the nice-guy Brandon begins to morph into a minor version of the seductively crooked Walter, sporting slick suits and flashy bling, driving around in a muscle car with gorgeous women on his arm and becoming an arrogant, blowhard jerk.

Rene Russo shows up in a perfunctory window-dressing role as Walter's stylish wife, who might or might not be carrying on a thing with the virile young Brandon. And Armand Assante swaggers through as a dapper thug who goes ballistic when Brandon's hand gets cold and he starts picking a string of losers.

Eventually, it all boils down to a kind of wishy-washy morality tale in which the deck is stacked all the way for Brandon's ultimate redemption.

The screenplay by Dan Gilroy (Chasers) only superficially brushes over potentially dramatic issues such as gambling addition and the moral corruption that often follows big money into sports. And McConaughey's character is such an obvious good-guy pilgrim briefly traversing the sleazy underside before emerging into the light that he generates very little compelling interest or sympathy.

So it's left to Pacino to prance and pontificate, to roar and rumble like a roughly paternal old lion in an effort to inject life into the moribund tale. And he delivers with all the quirks and tricks in his overloaded acting bag, a fact that's not without considerable perverse entertainment value.

So while Two for the Money is no great shakes as a gambling drama, at least it allows Pacino to strut and fret a couple of hours upon the stage in full Shakespearean bravado. That might seem a sucker bet to many paying moviegoers, but Pacino makes it pay a modest jackpot.

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