A former college football star, Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey) finds himself approached by a notorious and famous bookie, Walter Abrams (Al Pacino) who shows him a way to really make money. Hopeful to mold Lang into his protégé, Pacino makes him his number one man at wheeling and dealing the world of sports gambling. In turn, this upsets his longtime employees, one in particular portrayed by Jeremy Pivens “Entourage” and his longtime wife, played by Renee Russo, who sees Abram’s downward spiral beginning as it has before. That’s because the screenplay is good at slowly allowing the evil of gambling to infiltrate lives at the pace of a terminal illness, so that by the time you have it, you’re hooked again, and it’s too late. In the end, the biggest gamble of all is betting on reality, on family, on your life, because as Pacino says early on in the film, “there’s more a high from losing than from the winning.” Too bad the movie couldn’t sustain its high. What started out as a fun ride, turns into a twisted ending and deplorable characters that we initially latched onto with hope and a high, much like McConaughey did. Two tiaras.