A Josh Hartnett jag from Black Hawk Down and to be fair this is the best effort I can remember from him. The remainder of the cast (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci) are so-so. Directed by Paul McGuigan (The Acid House from 1996!) off a script by Jason Smilovic.
I did not get this movie. It thinks it's so clever, sorting out the horse-racing fixers and bookmakers of NYC, but even I had it figured by the two-thirds mark; by then there just weren't enough moving parts and time remaining for it to go any other way. The only thing left open was just how good Lucy Liu was in bed, and the filmmakers would have us believe she was or is the best ever. I so hoped she was from a rival outfit and in a position to make us a better offer.
Roger Ebert: two stars. An exercise in chain yanking. Stephen Holden: "a shallow, dandified grandson of Pulp Fiction." The explicit and the obfuscated in those introductory flashback scenes tell you exactly how things are going to go. It was indeed difficult to see the point of Tucci and Robert Forster's police officers; I can only think that they were needed to make the numbers add up in that initial story.
