A tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing much...

Rating: 5/10 (25 May 2008)

I know that Pacino is a big fan of Shakespeare, so I thought I'd paraphrase old Will there to encapsulate how I felt about this warmed-over assembly of things that any alert audience has seen Al do before.
He's one of my favourite actors, but it's hard not to say that some of his choices of late have been extremely lazy. I thought Walter Abrams was exactly like Walter Burke in The Recruit, except - ironically for a movie linked to gambling - the stakes weren't as high by the time he came around to doing it all again in Two for the Money. Unlike many people, I also enjoy the frequent 'shouty' aspects of his method - but come on, just because you're good at being loud doesn't mean you have to play a demagogue over and over again. Vincent Hanna in "Heat" was often loud, for instance, but he wasn't an overtly controlling, manipulative master of his universe like we see in "The Devil's Advocate"; "Any Given Sunday"; "The Recruit", or indeed here...
Not to mention that this movie doesn't even do a very good job of showing an infrequent gambler like myself how the true expert "has to lose it all just to feel like they're alive". I don't buy this kind of talk that the movie peddles, at all. It feels too much like conventional wisdom that's been perverted and inverted, to me. I've heard of gamblers being in it for the 'highs and lows', but never for the 'lows and lows'. If that psychology were true, then a punter who loses a ton of money and soon finds themselves living in a cardboard box and eating from a dumpster still wouldn't have a problem. Why?! Because they'd be happy! Yet I've heard tales of lots of gamblers who are desperately unhappy with their lot, find it a miserable experience to lose an amount they can't afford, and would like desperately to rid themselves of this destructive compulsion. If I like something, then I don't want to give it up. It's impossible to feel elated by something and yet want to get rid of it. Contradictory. People who are tempted to take the leap are enslaved by the lure of a big win, which certainly does feel good, but the catch is that something like that comes around all too rarely to have any hope of exerting a positive influence in the long run.
That's my logic anyway, and if I'm wrong then the movie doesn't explain its glib philosophies adequately enough to teach me otherwise. All this product trades on is a hypothetical synthetic adrenaline rush delivered by two stars on autopilot, with not a scrap of substance to be found beneath its shiny surface. In short, "Two for the Money" heralds a payoff that's not worth laying down cold hard cash for.