Even though its two-hour-plus running time is dedicated to the proposition that "Two for the Money" is something fresh and worthy of serious attention, viewers have certainly seen this one before. Think "My Fair Bookie." Think "The Devil's Betting Advisor." Think "A Time to Shill." Think "Three-Point Underdog Day Afternoon." Think, um, "Gigli with Sports Gambling" if you want a better sense of its qualitative value, though. "Two for the Money" is an unstructured mess of a movie, several nuggets of narrative gold scattered without focus or resolution and topped off by one of those Al Pacino performances where he might as well be played by an impersonator.

Matthew McConaughey is Brandon Lang, a former college football star whose professional dreams are ended by a knee injury. His success picking football games for a shady Vegas-based 900-number racket draws the attention of Walter Abrams (Pacino), who runs a sports advisory service in New York. Abrams is a recovering drug and gambling addict, as well as a recovering alcoholic. He sees something in Brandon that he can use and he invites the rube to the big city, gives him a new name (John Anthony) and a new persona (cocky, generally obnoxious, but at least clean shaven) and the money begins to roll in. Luck proves to be a fickle lady, though, and as fast has Brandon/John rises, you just know that his descent is going to be just as swift. In fact, because this is a movie, you know that the second he has his best week ever and begins to believe his own clippings, things will fall apart instantly.

Everybody has their favorite cornball Al Pacino moments from the past 20 years, lines of dialogue where the master thespian inexplicably shouts a noun or an adjective that never should have been the focus of a sentence. The unmotivated yelling has become a startling form of performative Tourette's -- Pacino probably couldn't stop at this point if he wanted to. Some critics are likely to interpret Pacino's "Money" work as intentional self-parody, because surely he's a smart enough man to know that he's played this kind of unhinged father figure too many times. He walked on screen and my immediately response was, "Dude, he's Satan." As so often happens, Pacino's never better than when he's sharing quiet and vulnerable moments with either Brandon or his underused wife (Rene Russo, who should have had more to do than this, given that screenwriter Dan Gilroy is her husband). Mostly he just shouts a lot.

McConaughey gives one of his better performances here, trying to sufficiently delineate between the Brandon (Good Old Boy) and John (Gordon Gekko) personas.

With Pacino feasting on scenery, McConaughey obviously enjoying his character's duality and several crack supporting actors (including Jeremy Piven and Ralph Garman) in the background, "Two for the Money" could have gone the direction of one of those classic dramas of professional male bonding, unhealthy competition and backstabbing. It could have been the sports betting equivalent of "Tin Men" or "Glengarry Glen Ross" or "In the Company of Men," but Gilroy and director D.J. Caruso ("Taking Lives") are far too wedded to the adventures of the real-life Brandon Lane (or Lang or Link -- the puffed up self-promoter can't seem to decide his own name) to worry about polishing the script into solid fiction.

Real life is sloppy and sometimes characters enter or leave your world in anti-climactic ways, but the number of dead-end arcs in "Money" is just inexcusable. Armand Assante shows up in two scenes to compete in the hammy acting derby with Pacino, but his threatening Puerto Rican gambler is less adversarial than arbitrary. Ditto with Piven, who has several scenes as a fellow advisor who uses a computer-based betting system, but he gets offended by his new rival and vanishes. A cautionary tale involving a small-time client named Amir reaches a semi-peak early and never gets mentioned again. Jamie King and Carly Pope have fleeting and degrading scenes as women who get physical with Brandon/John, but don't really factor into the plot. Most annoying of all is Walter's heart problem, which features in at least a half-dozen conversations and moments of limited drama in the first half of the movie and then never gets mentioned again. What Chekhov said about the introduction of a gun goes equally for a coronary condition: Don't waste our time nattering about it if it doesn't actually mean anything.

Gilroy has his characters giving long monologues on the nature and secrets of gambling and sports, but if you don't come into the film knowing how to bet the over/under, it's doubtful that anything here is going to make you care to understand. The fact that the NFL justifiably refused to have any kind of involvement with the project just makes matters worse. For a film gunning for authenticity, nothing is more crippling than having characters watching cheesy fabricated footage of imagine football teams playing their way towards a mock Super Bowl known sadly as "The Big Game." Will Brandon/John pick non-affiliated Kansas City or non-affiliated New York? Given the faux sporting action, it's almost appropriate that "Money" was shot almost entirely in Vancouver with badly fabricated Gotham stages. If the film has a visual style, it isn't noticeable, nor is the film's moral stand on the behavior of any of the characters. It has no point of view.

By the time "Money" stumbles towards that "Big Game" and its climax, the ending is in limbo. It's not that it's building to a twist or to anything surprising, but Gilroy and Caruso have so many cliched balls in the air, guessing which ones will come down is impossible. It also isn't worth the effort.