Double-Shot Al Pacino Review: Two For The Money / The Panic In Needle Park

Al Pacino fans should find themselves quite sated this month. Like a junkie shooting an eightball, Pacino-ites get to mainline the Oscar-winning actor by way of two films -- one new theaters, one new on DVD -- each of them involving addiction.

The not-so-engaging drama, Two For The Money, is in theaters now. It's about a hotshot former jock named Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) who is hired away from his fly-by-night Vegas gig picking ballgames for a 900-service by bigshot New York sports betting king Walter Abrams (Pacino). He offers the boy fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. Shit gets effed up.

Watching people talk about betting on sports in a movie is only slightly more dramatic than watching an instant message chat in a movie, and director D.J. Caruso, who delivers the ins-and-outs of sports betting with dry, documentary precision, doesn't do much to change that. Caruso, who proved he can really get deep and dark with the revenge flick The Salton Sea in 2002, plays things safe and doesn't give Pacino much to do other than chew the scenery like some revered old Methodical goat.

Pacino isn't necessarily bad here, it's just that he's not much better that we have come to expect since he set a new standard for bluster for himself in Scent Of A Woman. He doesn't bark things like "God is an absentee landlord!" like he did in The Devil's Advocate, but he's certainly not subtle, like he was in...aw, heck, Pacino was never really subtle, was he? Also, he looks as if he's trying to throw his voice all the time, barely moving his mouth, like he was popped in the mouth and is afraid that if he shows too much expression that his lip will bust open.

Casting Pacino, who is 65, and Rene Russo, who is 51, as the parents of a 6-year-old is a bit of a stretch. Russo already proved by baring bottom (ad infinitum) in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) the point that older women can be vital and sexy, but here, she and Pacino defy the laws of nature by somehow birthing and weaning what should be their own grandchild. It is a little distracting.

Casting Entourage breakout Jeremy Piven as a third banana rival to McConaughey defies logic, too. While the bean-counters would never have allowed it, as Piven does not have the poster appeal of McConaughey, he would have been a lot more vibrant in McConaughey's part. Since Piven does not yet have a “type” in the minds of viewers, the move would have given him the leeway to take the needed risks, and he certainly has the chops to pull off a lead. Here, though, Caruso again plays it safe, and Piven almost seems like he's acting despondent over his underwritten role, not over his character being overlooked in favor of McConaughey’s new golden boy.

The script, by rusty scribe Dan Gilroy, does have a couple of highlights, including a razor-sharp scene where Pacino illuminates the nature of addiction while trawling for clients at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, but it doesn't consistently crackle. Ultimately, he doesn't prove much more than the fact that gamblers are addicts and some of them, like the high roller played by the ham-tastic Armand Assante, are not very nice.

A Panic In Needle Park, Pacino's first starring role (making its barebones DVD debut on October 18), offers a look at another unseemly side of New York -- that of a junkie haven. With only one prior on-screen appearance (a very tiny part in the 1969 Patty Duke movie Me, Natalie), Pacino, a year before The Godfather would kick off a 30+ year career run that continues to this day, is absolutely electric, playing his New York junkie Bobby with frightening realism.

He played opposite Kitty Winn's Helen, a good girl turned junk whore. Her transformation is countered almost perfectly by Pacino's never-changing bad boy, who, when Helen asks him to move away from Needle Park (the area around 72nd Street and Broadway), replies matter-of-factly, "It's where I live."

Playing alongside the fresh-faced Pacino, and looking a little wet-behind-the-ears themselves, are the gone-too-soon Raul Julia, playing a junkie artist friend of Helen's, and Pacino's fellow Actor's Studio alum Alan Vint, who, like Winn, inexplicably dropped out of Hollywood by the 1980s. Vint, who peaked with the lead in Macon County Line in 1974, plays narcotics detective Hotch with the kind of steely resolve that goes beyond the one-note. Richard Bright, who played Al Neri in all three Godfather movies, is terrifically sleazy as Bobby's older brother Hank, whose vice of choice is burglary instead of junk.

Not only are the performances powerful both individually and ensemble, but the presentation is, too. The under-saturated colors of the New York landscape make it feel cold and bleak, and the long takes lend a real sense of immersion in it, thanks to director Jerry Schatzberg, who would work with Pacino again in the ballsy Scarecrow in 1973.

The lengths to which he gets his cast to go for the sake of realism is amazing, with only Nick Nolte's sobering-up in The Good Thief (2002) coming to mind as being as harrowing. His script, adapted from James Mills's book by longtime partners/spouses Joan Didion and the late John Gregory Dunne, was rock-solid, with Dunne's brother, writer Dominick Dunne, producing. The whole affair still stands as a case of synchronicity that portrays the worm-ridden side of the Big Apple and of human nature, helping signal an entire decade of cynical cinema.

The relationship between Pacino's and Winn's characters, that of the self-aware addicts, stands out. Rather than judging and damning each other for their addictive behaviors, they accept, understand and support each other through the worst. Conveniently, and to the credit of Two For The Money, Pacino's and Russo's characters share that same dynamic, even though of the two films, Panic is far more memorable.

Now if only someone could convince Fox to also release Pacino's own personal My Dinner With Andre, the barely-seen 2000 play adaptation, Chinese Coffee...