Please don't spend money on this.

Great Film overall

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Better Late Then Never

THIS cast could have taken the film into a 'HIGHER realm' of movie magic than the 'Great Abraham' ever managed. BUT it never gets going... Disappointing Mark Rydell film that fails to 'take off'....KGrammar&RLiotta, terrific actors both, seem in suspended animation. Can't put my finger on the problem, but the spark is not quite there.Happy to hire this DVD based on the talent displayed on the front cover. Some good scenes especially where DDaVito is concerned.All told?This did not deliver the goods Would not recommend. This gets a "6", and feel generous with that.

Absolutely, without a shadow of doubt the worst movie i have ever seen.....Ever!! What's the deal with Kelsey Grammar's false nose??? Crooked nose or not, he'll always just be Frasier to me. If you haven't seen it, don't bother....after 10 minutes i knew i hated it but had to watch it to the end in the hope that by some miracle the actors would start doing what they were being paid to do...ie. Act! and the poor story would somehow become bearable. Needless to say, neither things happened. I don't know who was the worst, Kim Basinger and her screaming shaky head or Forrest Whitaker repeating the one line he had in the film, "Godfrey Snow, Godfrey Snow!".AAAAHHHH!

The comparisons to "Babel" and "Fast Food Nation" are way off the mark. "Even Money" is a film noir with revenge at its center, in gambling win or lose there is a payday and in this movie all the debts are paid, and there is potential for two couples to emerge from their morass. This is a good film, directed by a pro, Mark Rydell, who has even has a cameo role in which some of the irony and mystery is explained.This is a sleazy movie -- to paraphrase Michael Douglas in "Wall Street," sleaze is good, and tips its hat to Orson Welles in one of my favorite films, "Touch of Evil." Yes, it is about addiction and much of the extraordinary cast (Kim Basinger, Kelsey Grammar, Danny Devito, Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotto and Tim Roth among them) play it carefully, straddling the line, without becoming camp or going over the top. High marks to the director for this.If you like your cynicism straight and don't turn your head at a little cinematic violence this is a movie you will enjoy. Its well worth taking a flier on.

"Even Money" is an ensemble drama that aims to be the Traffic or Syriana of gambling, but comes off closer to Crash—a trite amalgam of scenes we've seen many, many times before. The fact that you've heard so little about a film with such an impressive cast (Kim Basinger, Ray Liotta, Danny DeVito, Tim Roth, Kelsey Grammar, Nick Cannon, Jay Mohr, Carla Gugino, Forest Whitaker) should tell you something; indeed, the scuttlebutt on the ol' World Wide Internets is that the film was headed straight to DVD until Whitaker picked up the Oscar.The cast is mostly good, but there's only so much that they can do with this material. Basinger and Liotta are especially hard up, stranded in a story thread that is older than the hills; poor Carla Gugino is stuck playing the same scene (by my count) three times straight, which is a criminal misuse of an actress as intelligent and sexy as she. Tim Roth has some nice moments as an especially snarky bad guy, though this viewer wondered if he would really show up at the college basketball game that provides the film's climax (with a resolution that can be clearly seen the moment the story turn is introduced). Kelsey Grammar (nearly unrecognizable) appears, at the film's beginning, to be doing an interesting piece of character acting as a cop, but he then disappears for over an hour, which makes his character's big final scene somewhat less than compelling."Even Money" is a mess, an attempt to manufacture a prestige picture by throwing many talented actors at a script whose most complex insight appears to be "gambling is bad". We should expect as much from producer Bob Yari, who gave us the aforementioned "Crash" ("racism is bad"). Director Mark Rydell has helmed a couple of successful films ("On Golden Pond", "The Cowboys") and some interesting failures ("Intersection", "The Rose"), but when he pops up briefly as a powerful figure at the end of "Even Money", all I could think of was his similar acting role in Altman's "The Long Goodbye", and how much I'd rather be watching that movie than this one.