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 Review by
MATT KINNE
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How responsible are you to your clients for bad advice that makes them lose their homes and dignity? Can you trust your new protégée with your wife? How far can you push your protégée before he begins to resent you? How much of the world can you gain before you begin to lose your soul? These and other questions lie at the heart of TWO FOR THE MONEY. On the surface, the movie is about sports gambling but underneath the obvious, it’s about building and losing a family structure on lies.
 Matthew McConaughey plays Brandon Lang, a washed up former college football quarterback with a knack for picking winning college and pro football teams. Al Pacino plays Walter Abrams, a sports betting bookie that plucks Brandon out of obscurity, gives him a new name, and grooms him to become a sports predicting god. Though initially a fine fellow, Brandon begins to alienate his real family and compromise his own values. Throughout it all, he discovers just what sort of boss he has and what sort of racquet he’s fallen into.
Brandon discovers Walter bought him a hooker and a thousand dollar bottle of wine. When Brandon teases Walter to give him more money as a commission for a win, Walter pulls him close and threatens him with vitriolic words. Walter even fakes a heart attack to test the loyalty of his new star player.
 The better Brandon does, the more rewards he receives. Starting on the first floor as a mere voice on a 900 line, Brandon goes up to the second floor where the real action is, culminating in picking multi-million dollar bets from the world’s biggest sports gamblers. Eventually, Brandon must decide if to “stay in the game” or punt after a series of emotional crashes. When a client calls to tell Brandon he has lost everything, Brandon must do some extreme soul searching. With expert dialogue and great acting, (especially by Pacino who seems to chew scenery with the greatest of ease), TWO FOR THE MONEY is essentially a morality play on the dangers of toying with money, lives and relationships. At the start of the movie, Brandon says in narration that his father worshiped sports as a religion. Brandon goes on to say his intentions with sport are more pure, but inevitably, it all goes awry again. The ending is reminiscent of another Pacino classic THE GODFATHER. In that epic, Pacino baptizes his son in the Catholic Church, while members of the Corleone family waste away human lives in hails of gunfire. It’s a masterpiece of editing, juxtaposing the sacred and the profane. Here, not two but three actions inter-cut and play out, as a football team wins, Brandon walks and Walter discovers a secret. The result, in this movie, is not quite effective, but still brilliant.
 Whether you like this movie or not depends on how much you like sports, gambling or Al Pacino, all three depicted to the extreme. Gambling erodes human dignity, no doubt, and it’s a message worth telling. With lots of foul language and dubious morality exhibited, you may wonder if you need to wallow in this spiritual/moral muck to know that it’s dirty.
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