The Movie:

Oscar nominated director Mark Rydell's look at the problems that those suffering from gambling addiction deal with is a heavy handed, predictable, and all together uninspired drama that is, to be blunt, very contrived.

The film follows the lives of a few different gamblers, and we get to know them as their lives intertwine. Carol (Kim Basinger) makes her living as a writer. She's married with a couple of kids but more important to her than her own family is the irresistible siren call of the slot machine! A bookie named Murph (Grant Sullivan) does well in his occupation but when he falls for Veronica (Carla Gugino) he has to hide his career from her. Clyde (Forest Whitaker) has a taste for betting on college basketball - how convenient then that his brother Godfrey (Nick Cannon), who he is quite close with, is hitting his stride and considered a hot ticket on the college basketball circuit. Meanwhile, a lowlife bookie named Victor (Tim Roth) toils away in the trenches for his mysterious boss, Ivan.

Things get complicated when Carol meets a professional magician named Walter (Danny De Vito) who tells her he wants to help her win back the family savings that she's squandered during her many flings with the one-armed bandit. Unfortunately, Carol's husband, Tom (Ray Liotta), is starting to notice that she's out of the house a lot lately, supposedly working on her novel at the coffee shop. A bookie turns up dead, causing Detective Brunner (Kelsey Grammer) to arrive on the scene and poke his nose in where it doesn't belong, and later, Clyde finds himself so far in debt that he has no choice but to ask Godfrey to throw his next game so that he can collect the big pay out. It's at this game that our characters' lives all start to boil up together, but by that point you're not likely to care.

The debut screenplay from Rober Tannan lacks honest characterization and at times feels like its pandering to what the writer thinks everyday people should sound like, rather than how they actually talk to one another. As such, there are some awkward clichés in the script (Liotta and Basinger's back and forth about divorce for example) that don't do the picture any favors. A few of the characters are interesting - Roth as Victor overacts but he's at least somewhat mysterious - but generally not given much to do aside from submit to their vices and prove that, yes, gambling addiction is a problem. In that regard, the film pretty much just points out the obvious and talks down to its audience.

One would think given the interesting cast assembled for the picture that there would be a few great performances in the picture, but sadly most of the talent here either phones it in or overdoes it. Whitaker chews the scenery, as do Basinger and Liotta, while Grammer plays his detective like a gumshoe out of a pulp novel. De Vito stands out in that he's actually fairly good in his part, but he's not in the picture enough to help it much.

In the end, the film's message just completely bogs down the narrative. We know from the start where Grammer finds the body of a dead bookie washed ashore that the film is pointing out the dangers inherent in gambling - and if the message is made clear that early on and there's little else to the film, why bother sitting through the rest of it?

Video:

This review of Even Money is based on the test disc that Fox has sent over so keep in mind that it's not representative of final product. The test disc features a poor 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. There are compression artifacts all over the place and the picture is murky. Hopefully the finished disc looks better than this.