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Odds-on favourite flick for sports fans
TWO FOR THE MONEY
Directed by DJ CARUSO
Certificate 15
AL Pacino and Matthew McConaughey (pictured) headline this rousing
drama about sports betting.
Rene Russo co-stars as Pacino’s long-suffering
wife, a perpetually worried woman who tries to look after the
health and safety of her compulsive spouse, a man who has the
nerve to go to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and dole out business
cards for his TV betting programme.
Pacino’s Walter Abrams is an eternal optimist who finds
McConaughey’s character Brandon Lang at a small time phone
betting operation.
Once a promising American football player, Lang’s career
was bitterly terminated with a vicious knee injury that ensured
no team in the country would be fool enough to take him on.
After making an offer too good to refuse to Lang – whose
own ability to pick winners stands at an astonishing 80 per
cent – Abrams begins to take the newcomer under his wing,
showing him the fruits of what betting advice can bring. Lang
gets new suits, a new haircut, a new Mercedes and women, all
paid for on credit by his new boss.
Soon, Lang is given a new sharklike identity with the moniker
John Anthony and Abrams has him exalted among his other tipsters
as the man to listen to. Of course, during all this, we see
Pacino’s eyes growing larger wilder.
But the excitement and the personal projection Abrams ladles
onto Lang is too much for the man and he begins to slide back
into his old destructive ways, threatening to lose his business,
his health, his family and his wife all in one go.
Pacino’s Abrams is a rare creature in modern cinema –
a man of many parts, of contradictions and bad judgements, of
clarity and hope.
He’s a complicated man who is only at times easy to predict
and while the film’s final denouement is a bit of a cheat,
the outcome never seems pat.
Even with something such as Two For The Money which, to its
credit, does wrest as much excitement out of betting as it can,
Pacino is amazing to watch.
Director D J Caruso makes the most of his cast and their setting
in the high tension world of losing one’s shirt for football. |
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