Review of Casino Jack (2010) by Amanda R — 24 Nov 2011

I've read a lot about the Abramoff/Scanlon scandal, and it's a good thing I did: had I not, I would've been lost. While I admit it was nice to see the most alarmingly memorable snippets of the email correspondence between the two show up verbatim in dialogue here, the plot of the film didn't come through as clearly as it should have. But that's not the biggest problem of Casino Jack - the biggest problem is that it doesn't have quite the right tone. The film needed a dark streak that it just didn't have. And while it was still gratifying to see these two jackoffs (see, I did like a thing here - "Abraham Jackoff" was a nickname of Jack Abrahmoff in college) fall in the end, I don't get the sense that anything was learned from either of them - about anything. And maybe that's because they didn't in real life. But this is fiction here. You can take a creative license here and there with certain things.

Despite all this, the film was still enjoyable. Spacey was phenomenal, as always. But that's a given. A wonderful film needs more than just a given to get by on. And as it stands, this film was merely good.