"Two for the Money" makes something very clear: Matthew McConaughey suffers when Al Pacino is around to show what real acting should look like.
McConaughey plays Brandon Lang, a cocky football player who receives a career-ending blow to his leg during a college game. Lang takes up a career predicting college football game outcomes for a 1-900 number corporation in Las Vegas and doesn't take himself too seriously. Walter Abrams (played beautifully by Pacino) discovers Lang's knack for picking winners and hires him for his sports betting firm in New York City. Lang initially picks winners at an alarming rate and achieves an even bigger ego. But when he loses his touch, he has to try to save the sports empire that Abrams created around him.
The beginning sets up the movie as a drama, but the film soon begins to change first into a comedy, then into a thriller and finally into a feel-good drama. "Two for the Money" can't pick a genre to settle for, nor can it smoothly weave through every genre that it chooses. The movie feels drawn out at times and crashes at the end, but it's saved by the fact that it isn't solely focused on football and gambling. There's a current of character development and emotion that runs beneath the film and gives it a pulse. Pacino has his finger on that pulse.
Pacino gives Abrams a life that makes the audience hate him and root for him in the same breath. Abrams is a man with many masks in his life. He's a family man; a pitiful old man, a Don Corleone and a comedian. Pacino slips in and out of each mask with ease and grace, making it obvious around whom the movie revolves. Pacino makes Abrams, who could have been dangerously portrayed as a larger-than-life character, human and realistic. McConaughey can't stand up against Pacino and is left merely spouting his lines. Only Rene Russo (who plays Abrams' wife, Toni Morrow) matches Pacino onscreen. Morrow defends her husband with ferocity and compassion, with Russo delving headfirst into the character to create the only woman who could ever be married to Abrams. She's real and she's believable. McConaughey's performance, however, is not.
Lang is an arrogant, womanizing jock. When he begins his rise to power in Abrams' firm, Abrams somehow sees the need to create a new name for him, John Anthony, because he feels that Lang sounds like too much of a "nice guy." There is no difference between Lang and Anthony, no matter how much Abrams and Morrow say that there is. McConaughey doesn't separate the characters nearly enough. The only time Lang shows any compassion is when Abrams experiences pain from his failing heart. But the compassion suddenly displayed is in such sharp contrast to how the character behaved previously that it's dissonant and completely unrealistic.
Viewers who don't understand football and who don't gamble will not have a difficult time watching this movie if they ignore the fast speeches of jargon sprinkled in the movie and understand the principle that it's good if the football teams that Abrams' firm picks wins. The football and the gambling are not central to this movie, which thankfully is about the lives of the characters and their evolution during the movie (except for McConaughey, who remains stagnant until the very end). "Two for the Money" would be a very good movie if not for the poor ending and choice of casting McConaughey in what could have been a brilliant supporting role.
