Two for the Money (Universal, 10.7) is about this hunky ex-college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with some kind of supernatural psychic ability to pick the winners of football games. Or who knows teams and their quirks and tendencies so well it seems like he’s got a crystal-ball thing going on. And he gets hired to work for a kind of high-end betting consultancy firm, run by this larger-than-life blowhard named Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), that sells information about which teams to bet on and…I can’t do this. I don’t mind gambling as long as it’s not my money on the table, and I dearly loved California Split, one of the hippest and sexiest loose-shoe gambling movies ever made. But this thing has no groove or heat. It plays loud and abrasive, and feels boorish and forced. It was directed by D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives, Salton Sea), but, being a Morgan Creek film, was almost certainly influenced in a hundred hair-on-the-back- of-your-neck ways by M.G. honcho James G. Robinson, who is known by anyone who’s worked in this town as the biggest bad-vibe producer around. Somehow, through force of will or obstinacy or what-have-you, just about every film Robinson has made has seemed a little bit icky or underwhelming or crude or less-than-cool. All I know is, Morgan Creek = caveat emptor. And I figure Robinson is probably at least partly to blame for the sand-draining-out-of-the-hourglass feeling that runs all through Two For the Money. It doesn’t figure that Caruso could have screwed up this badly. His last two films were second-tier but they were at least stylistically intriguing and had some good moves here and there, so something happened this time. Consider the following: when last night’s all-media screening at the Mann’s Chinese ended, a certain big-name critic came up to a colleague and expressed his feelings about Two for the Money by forming an imaginary pistol with his thumb and right forefinger, holding it to his head and then pulling the trigger. This was more entertaining than anything that had transpired on the screen. Plus it was enormously comforting to feel a sense of kinship.
