Roger Ebert Loved A 2005 Al Pacino Sports Movie Streaming On Netflix

Sports betting has been a perilous pastime for gamblers for centuries. For many people, it's not enough to take in a sporting event on its own competitive terms. They need skin in the game, money of their own, and the hope of a multi-parlay cashout or an underdog beating the odds to deliver a miraculous windfall. For experienced betters, there is the mirage of managed risk – and, if you're risking money you can afford to lose, this concept isn't entirely bunk. But look at someone like David Milch. The creator of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood" squandered his fortune at the racetrack and wound up $17 million in debt to the IRS (and on a $40-a-week allowance).

The proliferation of online sports gambling has drained millions of people of money they could not afford to lose. Fortunately, people are starting to catch on to how ruinous this compulsion can be. Per a 2025 Pew Research poll, 43% of respondents said that legal sports gambling was bad for society. That was up from 34% in 2022.

But the temptation to win big on a sporting event over which you have zero control ain't going anytime soon, which is why movies like D.J. Caruso's "Two for the Money" will remain relevant. Written by "Nightcrawler" and "Andor" scribe Dan Gilroy, this 2005 drama, about a veteran "sports consultant" (Al Pacino) who takes a former college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with a sharp sense of picking winners under his wing, presaged to a degree our current sports gambling mania. And while it received mixed reviews, it had a notable champion in Roger Ebert. How does it play today?

In his three-and-a-half-star review of "Two for the Money," Ebert is dialed in on Pacino's electrifying performance, which he thought was yet another in a run of magnificent turns fired by his acting documentary "Looking for Richard." I love this paragraph about Pacino as a master reborn:

"But good as he already was, I think something rotated inside and clicked as he was directing ["Looking for Richard"] ... Here was an actor in his mid-50s, asking undergraduate questions, reinventing how he approaches a role, asking what acting is. He chose "Richard III," a character who looks in a mirror and asks himself how he should play himself. In his movies since then, Pacino seems to have found something in the mirror."

I agree, but will counter that the sharpest post-"Looking for Richard" reflection was malevolently aglow in Taylor Hackford's sublime 1997 thriller "The Devil's Advocate" (which was co-written by Dan's brother Tony Gilroy). "Two for the Money" is a riff on the same Faustian theme with McConaughey in the Keanu Reeves role. Pacino is superb here, but as the film's rise-and-fall formula hits its inevitable climax, with McConaughey having to hit on one last piece of brilliant gambling advice, you feel shortchanged. The sports gambling business is rotten to its core, and no one who preys on the hope of the financially vulnerable deserves to walk away clean. And, oh yeah, Al Pacino's finest hour arrived in "Carlito's Way."