HELLO MY NAME IS AL PACINO! YOU MAY REMEMBER ME FROM SUCH FILMS AS SCENT OF A WOMAN AND THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE! If you’re the sort of person who enjoys reading about Alex Higgins playing ten quid snooker games in the hostel where he currently resides then y ou may well get a kick from watching Mr. Pacino hoo-ha-ing his way through the woeful Two For The Money.
An enterprise so low rent it features Matthew McConaughey in the lead role, D.J. Caruso’s film lazily trades on buddy clichés, half-arsed moralising and Al sleepwalking through a supporting role in a manner that suggests he’s recently stumbled out of an opium den. Then, perhaps because some unseen stagehand is attacking him with an electric cattle prod or perhaps because he’s suddenly realised he’s in a Matthew Mc Conaughey film, there are the now familiar outbursts of SHOUTING LIKE THIS.
Borrowing some set plays from the testosterone frenzy of Wall Street and Any Given Sunday (without the competence of either), Two For The Money sees Pacino assume mentor duties to McConaughey’s Vegas hick, a washed up college footballer with preternatural abilities for sports handicapping. Bringing him into a betting agency with such clients as “the biggest sports people in the world”, Pacino teaches his charge how to swear (“that’s just how people talk in New York”), how to dress and how to make lascivious comments at passing birds. McConaughey repays him with an awesome winning streak before it all goes to his head and the entire company takes the fall.
There’s a nonsensical subplot involving Rene Russo as Pacino’s wife and the much older girl next door – this being set in New York, the cast wander in and out of each other’s dwellings as if it were Walton Mountain – but the entire enterprise limps along so unconvincingly that by the denouement you’ll have long since stopped caring which romantic rival will get to help Ms. Russo across the road.
Pointless rubbish. And not in a good way.