www.twoforthemoney.netIt’s been a long time since I saw previews for a movie a month in advance and actually muttered the phrase “Ok, I HAVE to see this.” That’s how I felt when I saw the previews for “Two for the Money” about a month ago. As a huge sports fan and a more-than-occasional sports bettor, I thought this movie had tremendous potential-the thought of a movie all about sports gambling seemed just too good to be true. Turns out, it was.
The movie starts out with Brandon Lang, played by Matthew McConaughey, a former D-I football player who tore apart his knee and has been working odd jobs ever since. He finds his niche picking football games working for a 900-number company, and is inevitably recruited by the big fish. Al Pacino plays Walter, the head of the biggest sports advising business in the country, and his character bears an incredible resemblance to Pacino’s character from “The Recruit.”
Herein lies the problem at hand and why the movie is a huge disappointment-these guys aren’t even bookies. They are “sports advisers,” who do little but simply pick the winners of every football game of the week, and people for some reason trust them, giving them a commission if they win and nothing if they lose. Sports advisers? That’s like a glorified Chris Berman, except without the humor of picking scores like 2-1 when the Jets played the Ravens.
Not only that, but Walter transforms Lang into a new persona, as if giving McConaughey’s character a suit and a haircut will suddenly make him “John Anthony” and let him walk on water. Furthermore, he hypes Anthony’s “big break” as appearing on his weekly infomercial where a bunch of guys just yell and scream and say how much they know about football.
As Anthony continues to go 12-2 and 14-0 each week, accumulating cars and money, it is pretty obvious what is going to happen next. He gets cocky and starts to lose, and business goes down the hole. The entire rest of the movie turns into a life lesson on why not to let success go to your head, and the innate desire of a gambler to lose everything. The movie gets extremely sappy from that point on, as Walter even suspects an affair between Anthony and his wife, and has it thrown in his face.
The movie is an overall disappointment, because moviegoers are expecting to see the “dark world” of sports gambling, and instead see a bunch of buffoons and computer geeks in suits on an infomercial. Don’t get me wrong, when McConaughey grabs his golf clubs, tells the boss he’s leaving for the day and picks the games on the fly five days in advance, that’s the guy we were expecting to see. But the cool, pompous ‘I am a golden god’ version of John Anthony only lasts for about 10 minutes because once he has a 3-11 week, he breaks down and panics.
There are also little things in sports movies that are guaranteed to drive sports fans wild. The first, since the NFL clearly wouldn’t give the right to use team names and jerseys to a movie about sports gambling, the final game was Super Bowl XXXX, which, for anyone who knows anything about roman numerals, is just dead wrong. Another thing is, and this is coming from a guy from New Jersey, they had New York winning the Super Bowl. That is just far too clich‚. Perhaps the worst part, however, is the final scene. The movie concludes with McConaughey coaching pee wee football, and one of the kids says, “Are we gonna win?” McConaughey responds, “I’d bet on it.” Terrible.
If you want an inside look on the dark world of sports betting, you are better off taking a jog down to Max’s Sports Bar on a Sunday afternoon, because you just won’t find it in this movie.