Jack uses his laundered money to build restaurants or Jewish schools, our devil’s advocate. Almost every character tainted hands in this fictional yet probably accurate portrayal of Washington.

The film knows that it’s audience is smart enough to know that if congressmen wanted to write effective laws, they’d visit their constituents. He says that his job, lobbying helps congressmen to decide the laws for America. Jack tries to convince us that he’s in the right while the film tries to convince us that he’s either deluded or caught up.

Affluence doesn’t mean convenience, especially if your means are illegitimate. The film’s first scene shows him claiming, in front of a mirror, that he works hard so that his family doesn’t have to walk or ride the subway, juxtaposed by him getting stuck in traffic with his daughter, hearing bad news from his partner Michael Scanlon ( Barry Pepper), hiding from FBI for frauding left and right. Instead we get an ex-movie producer quoting movies a lot, with delusions of grandeur and a warped perception of competitive capitalism. I have faint recollections of people belonging to the footnotes of history, and the film’s subject, Jack Abramoff ( Kevin Spacey), is supposedly a monstrous figure. I’m a Metacritic slave I so might never see The Mechanic. I’m watching Casino Jack in January instead of The Mechanic, ditching a friend in the process :(. My intuition failed, choosing a movie that came to theatres four days before this one, thinking this had better distribution chances. I felt bad about missing Casino Jack since director George Hickenlooper‘s untimely death. I skipped it for Modra, a Canadian film with hip reviews and hipper people giving out flyers for it.

Background – Passes for Casino Jack came with the package I bought at TIFF.

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