While watching Two for the Money, I kept asking myself, “How much would this movie suck if the cast wasn’t so terrific?” It uses the Billy Bathgate trope to disguise an addiction to risking it all to feel alive trope and losing oneself to the hype trope. Initially it is fun, but predictably at the hour mark, everything starts to go south. I love Al Pacino’s schtick, and he does some amazing work here. He rocks the older guy running rings around the younger, slick-in-training younger man, and I’ll take his brand of self-impersonation over Robert DeNiro any day. Dare I say that I saw a bit of his Attica younger self in a brilliant speech on the sidewalk about everyone being f***ed up. There are plenty of great speeches. For the first half of the movie, McConaughey appears to be in various states of undress. McConaughey does a good job, but his performances now are just perfection so this one was somewhat meh. It is always a delight to see Rene Russo. Jeremy Piven fans will be delighted to hear that he is in it, but honestly Two for the Money is bloated and needed a trim as badly as McConaughey’s hair in this film.