Excellent, a Must See

Too much about the plot just didn't add up, the writing was bad, some of the scenes were cringey and awkward,

it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I am not a massive sports or sports movie fan. But then this film is more about gambling, ambition and greed.The main character is sucked in to a new and exciting world by Al Pacino's character who takes eccentric to new levels.The film is fairly slow and the plot flows along fairly gently, which is just as well because there really isn't a lot of substance to it.The characters are engaging and just enough happens to keep you interested.The majority of the film centres around the affect of success and the motivations that drive the successful on.This is good for an idle Sunday afternoon. Good performances and production but nothing special going on and no fireworks.

Al Pacino continues his run of starring alongside a younger rising star. In Two for the Money he plays Walter Abrams, domineering, highly strung sports book adviser and former gambling addict with a dodgy heart.Matthew McConaughey plays Brandon Lang, a former American Footballer whose out of the game permanently due to a knee injury but has an instinctive ability to call the game and game-plays.Abrams takes Lang under his wing as his protégé, grooming him, shaping him, changing his clothes, style and even his name as Lang picks winners and attracts big time gamblers who bet more on more each week.The film itself is standard text of a sports drama film with first you see the coaching of the young star, then his swift rise to the top and then the catalyst that leads to a decline before the film heads for a finish.In this case Abrams refuses to share the wealth with Lang who is now attracting high rollers and Lang hits self destruct and starts to pick losers affecting the company and his clients who are losing big time. Of course from very early on from Pacino's full on performance as larger than life Abrams, this is a person you can never keep up with and he is in fact warned early on by Abrams's wife played by Rene Russo.Of course the biggest problem from the outset is that we see Pacino play these characters before and you see a trail already as where this film is going. Also we have to swallow just because a person has played the game, understands the game he can call the game. In that case, surely other footballers could do the same? Sports is based on many factors such as mistakes, slips, bad calls and incidents rather than pure skill from the other side, it what makes the game exciting and difficult to predict.So what starts as mildly interesting is as predictable as a tame roller coaster ride. Nothing too exciting but both leads have charm enough to keep you watching.

'Two for the money' is based on the story of Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey), a promising football player who suffers a serious injury, and while recovering and trying to make a living discovers he has a big talent in guessing how the matches turn out. He's hired by Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), the owner of a big betting agency, who helps turning him into a personality and earning loads of money. But as he gets more and more successful, things get out of control and he doesn't know who he is anymore.Well, for me the whole thing just didn't work at all. The plot is absolutely shallow and predictable and there are just too many clichés. I can't believe anyone still bases a movie on the 'how-far-will-I-go-before-I-lose-myself' routine. The pace of the film is awful, being exciting only in the beginning; the viewer will quickly lose his interest in the continuity of things. There's also what for me seems to be an unrealistic fact in the film – how come a beginner in the betting business gets to rise so fast and gets so much investment out of nowhere? – it's either an incoherence or more time should've been spent in explaining Brandon's career beginning.To add up to the terrible script there's the fact that Matthew McConaughey is absolutely untalented and just doesn't have what it takes to lead a film that isn't a chick flick. Perhaps that is even more transparent when you're acting beside Al Pacino. His entire character is a cliché. On the other hand there's Al's part which he plays as well as usual. It's not a special or unforgettable performance, but in my opinion he was prejudiced by his character. Both his and McConaughey's parts are poorly built; Al's the most, and I got completely confused on what I was suppose to think about Walter Abrams. Is he a nice guy with a gambling problem and some psychological issues or is he a greedy, lying bastard who will do anything for his benefit? I didn't know whether to root for the leading man or the supporting actor– though I'll always pick Al, that's for sure.The only good couple of moments in this film in my opinion were the ones that focused on Al and Rene Russo, who although barely appears in the film, works well. Their relationship is one of the few convincing facts in this movie. Other than that there is actually a nice message at the end of the film regarding self-destruction.Al can't perform miracles !

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.