Casino Jack: An Awful Movie About an Awful Person

Overall the film Casino Jack is an awful movie about an awful person. The feeling we were left with after seeing it was somewhere between nausea and an intense desire to shower to wash the sleaze off.

The reviewers will praise all the components of the film - the acting, directing, writing, pacing, filming and so on. It is a professionally made Hollywood film. But in the big picture - it's all wrong.

Kevin Spacey plays a horrible person and he just does not pull it off. He tries hard with an opening scene that is the most in your face over-acting we have ever seen. Spacey lectures himself with a confused pep talk in a public restroom mirror. It made no sense, it set no tone, it did not define the character and the acting wasn't engrossing. We did not want to get to know Abramoff after seeing the scene. And we wanted to know less and less about that awful person as the film unfolded.

Barry Pepper and Jon Lovitz play equally distasteful colleagues of Abramoff (Michael Scanlon and Adam Kidan). We can't imagine why Lovitz would want the repelling part that he plays. There is in that character no attractive decadence, no movie gangster persona at all. The Scanlon part is even worse, sleaze with no point to it. None of the protagonists learn anything as the story unfolds. They are unbridled oily criminals who never have a second thought about what they are doing.

The final and well-known denouement leaves everyone unraveled and unrepentant, repugnant as ever.

We thought before seeing it for some reason that this would be a funny film, that these would be charming crooks. Spacey-Abramoff does get to invoke his Yeshiva building and kosher restaurant opening activities as sidelights to the unfolding action. That just leaves us with more random puzzle pieces that don't add to this unsatisfying, unnerving and unnecessary motion picture.

Sometimes real life tragic sleazy events need to be retold to entertain, inform or educate us. This clearly was not one of those times.

Don't waste your time or money on this movie mistake, the single worst film that we have ever seen.