EVEN MONEY: Don't Cash In On This
 To heck with EVEN MONEY. I’ll give you three-to-one odds that you won’t enjoy this flick, despite its surprisingly excellent cast. Whodathunk so many great actors would need cash so badly? And Kim Bassinger is also in the movie.
How bad is the film? The special features are trailers for other movies. It’s as though no one connected with EVEN MONEY wanted any further association with it. No director’s or actors’ commentaries. No behind the scenes documentary. Just a: “Let’s slap a couple of trailers on here so no one will feel entirely cheated.
Cheated of course is an appropriate emotion for this film about the evils of gambling. There are several inter-related tales that sort of come together in the end, a kind of homage to CRASH. Homage of course is French for “we don’t have a lot of time, so let’s copy something that’s won a lot of awards.”
Story one: Carolyn Carver (Bassinger) is the author of well received first novel who tells her husband Tom (Ray Liotta) that she’s writing her second book in a coffee shop. All the while she’s really in a casino, slot machining her family’s savings and daughter’s college fund away.
Story two: Clyde Snow (Forest Whitaker) is a handyman in debt to his bookies. They force him to get his younger brother Godfrey (Nick Cannon), a highly-ranked NBA prospect, to shave points in a collegiate conference championship game.
Story three: Augie (Jay Mohr) and Murph (Grant Sullivan) are childhood friends who went into business together – as bookies.
All of the stories are laid out on a road filled with plot holes so large a tank could fall in. There is no back story anywhere. We never learn, for example, how long Carolyn and Clyde have been gambling. Did they become addicts overnight? Why are Clyde and Godfrey so close? Did the older raise the younger? Why is it that Tom never checks his bank balance or even yells at his wife for coming home at all hours of the day. And most important, how did Det. Brunner (Kelsey Grammer) become a cop?
I’m not an expert on the Americans With Disabilities Act, but Brunner was wounded
Brunner has about three or four minutes of screen time in addition to some psychobabble voice over. Now we all know that Grammer was an addict himself during the height of his television career. He’s been clean for years and one wishes him all the best, but is it possible he slipped off the wagon when he signed up for this mess.
I can go on and on about unnecessary scenes, strange coincidences and other questions I had. But the point is viewers spend their time searching for answers that aren’t there, the filmmaker made a mistake. He bet he’d create a decent film – and he lost.
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