Casino Jack

A movie version of the Jack Abramoff story might sound like old news, but with the stranglehold of lobbyists in Washington as strong as ever, maybe the timing isn’t so bad after all. The film—not to be confused with Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money—is as slick as one presumes Abramoff (an almost unbearably smug Spacey) would want: as devoted to myth making as a man who—in the film, at least—attempts to escape indictment by pitching a Biblical epic to Paramount; as phony as a self-proclaimed devout Jew who broke a lot of commandments and who, despite claiming to keep kosher, happily signed on for sushi dinners.

Directed by the late George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness), the movie holds one’s attention by hewing closely to the usual porn star–gangster–businessman biopic conventions. Lovitz as a sleazy mattress salesman, Preston as Abramoff’s wife and Pepper as business partner Michael Scanlon are all along for the ride. Even by standards of the genre, though, Norman Snider’s screenplay—which attempts to disguise large, undigested chunks of biographical and contextual information as dialogue (“They’re calling us the new Watergate, Jack!”; “Remember that time you brought Pavarotti to Brandeis? No one thought you could pull it off”) skirts the edge of embarrassment. There’s finally about as little substance here as there was in Abramoff’s casino deals. Still, there were worse shams this year.