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In today’s Director’s Spotlight, the filmmaker in question and his three most recent films all exist in a similar genre, appeal to like-minded moviegoers, and have high-concept plots. That said, the three films are all over the map in terms of actual quality. DJ Caruso is not exactly what you would call the thinking man’s auteur – in fact, you probably wouldn’t call him much of an auteur at all. He is, however, a Hollywood craftsman, not without some level of creative flair. He can pull the right strings and push the right buttons to get your blood flowing in a taut drama or thriller – some of the time. At other times, it feels like Caruso simply went by a dull shoot-by-numbers director’s manual.

Two For The Money

On paper, Two For The Money probably sounded great. Hollywood often tries to pitch audiences on ideas that seem fantastic in theory but that are difficult to execute. “Imagine the Godfather meets the Matrix” is one that I’ve heard recently used to describe the highly anticipated Inception. Agents and producers almost certainly sold the idea for Crank as: “it’s like the movie Speed but this time it’s a person, not a bus.” And it isn’t hard to imagine how the pitch went for Two For The Money. “Think the high stakes world of money (Boiler Room or Wall Street) and mesh that with the dramatic world of sports (probably Jerry Maguire).”

In Two For The Money, Matthew McConaughey plays former college-QB Brandon Lang. Lang has a bum knee and pipe dreams of returning to the NFL. As a day job he makes betting picks for radio listeners. Apparently, Lang is so good with his selections that it isn’t long before an overly theatrical Al Pacino comes calling to recruit his services. Pacino runs a legal operation of sleazy salesmen who solicit deep-pocketed, gambling-addicted yuppies to take their betting advice for a 10% fee. It seems win-win at first, with Pacino & Co. only getting a cut when they give winning advice. Apparently things go awry and the stakes get high when Lang losses his soothsaying touch. But trust me, you’ll have to wade through at least 60 minutes of absolutely zero stimulus before you ever get to that point.

Two For The Money is a strange kind of bad. It misses nearly all of its dramatic beats and it isn’t nearly as fun or suspenseful as it wants to be. It never answers a paramount question: why should we care? Why do we care about Lang? What is interesting about this new world he is entering? Is there something dangerous about Pacino’s character? The trailers certainly lead me to believe there is something at stake here that I should care about – but I really can’t tell what it is. For a movie that insists that the stakes are high in the world of gambling, it never tells us what its characters have at stake. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street works in a lot of ways because Bud Fox commits insider trading and is always in danger of either running amuck with the law or being blind-sided by the greedy Gordon Gekko. Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire is great because of Maguire and Rod Tidwell’s David versus Goliath path that has you rooting for the reformed underdogs to make it big in the agent business and the NFL respectively. Two For The Money lacks any such dramatic hook and it all seems like such a waste because certainly there is a good movie that can be made about the world of high-stakes sports gambling. But when you have to resort to having Al Pacino literally fake a heart attack in one scene about halfway through just to make sure your audience still has a heartbeat too – well, there’s probably something missing from your screenplay.

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