The Good
An interesting movie with a very strong cast.
The Bad
No Extras came with this release.
This little known gem of a movie manages to mix up the lives of all it’s main characters as it shows just how destructive and off-putting gambling can be. Throwing us into this multidimensional world we have the characters of Clyde (Forest Whitaker), Walter (Danny DeVito), Carol (Kim Basinger), Detective Brunner (Kelsey Grammer) and Victor (Tim Roth) who take the main stage. They are supported by the likes of Augie (Jay Mohr), Tom (Ray Liotta) and Godfrey (Nick Cannon) among others. Through all of these people we see how their worlds are all interconnected, how much one event can effect someone else, and the vagaries of getting involved with people under shady circumstances. We see how people’s lives can rise and fall based on the luck of the draw and how life truly is, at times, the ultimate gamble.
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There is a detailed story to Even Money. We follow each character and like molecules forming a substance, we see how they bounce off one another like atoms to create a varied reaction/compound. This movie felt a lot like Crash in how it showed us all these people’s lives and how we effect one another. Sadly, the human element that was so prevalent in that movie was almost non-existent here. I credit that to the world being put on screen (gambling), which doesn’t seem to have the sort of humanity that Los Angeles allows to emanate from its core.
Features
Video
Widescreen. Fox Home Video (who are dear friends) didn’t send me the packaging for this title. They didn’t send me anything except for a white envelope so all I can really say is Widescreen. This film looked solid if it at times a little too solid. I would have thought that with all the characters it would have wanted to seem more fluid in parts (that always makes these multiple storyline films easy to follow) but that wasn’t to be the case. For a burned DVD the colors and sharpness seemed to hold up quite nicely.
Audio
Again, not having the packaging to tell you exactly what sound was employed was kind of a bummer. I heard everything fine, however. I had expected this film to have more of a documentary-like flair but that wasn’t ever the case. Like the picture, things were structured and I think that sort of hurt this movies ability to flow. The characters and their lives were all supposed to be seamless and sadly I never got that feeling 100%.
Package
Again, Fox sent me this DVD without any of the requisite packaging. This being the case I really cannot speak too much about it.
Final Word
With multiple Academy Award winners (Basinger and Whitaker) as well other very solid actors (Liotta, DeVito, Grammer, etc.), why in the world did this movie come out in theaters and on DVD all but unnoticed? As someone who has tried to package various low budget movies, I can tell you that the one thing prospective investors and distributors want is a cast. Something that the American public can easily recognize and will thus shell out their money to see. I don’t claim to be an expert on the movie business but I feel that Even Money has those ingredients in spades. So I am left scratching my head over this movie? Was it something that people didn’t want to see? Was it something that maybe distributors and the like didn’t know how to market? Have we reached such a saturation point of mindless, explosion films that movies like Even Money now seem almost foreign to us?
It would be a sad state of affairs if the American populace allows themselves to be dumbed down without knowing it. Some skeptics might say, “Well the cream rises to the top. The best movies get their just desserts and maybe Even Money wasn’t that good?” Fine, but I find it hard to believe that anybody could somehow call Transformers or Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer the cream of the crop or even… good.
Even Money was released March 1, 2006.
