Movie Grade: C+
Documentary Grade: B

While typical movies are designed to entertain, documentaries are meant to inform. So if a typical hollywood movie were, say, a suspense novel, a documentary might be a really long term paper — It’s got a point to prove, and uses supporting evidence to do it. A good documentary, however, is able to prove it’s point while keeping the audience entertained. Think of Morgan Spurlock‘s antics in Supersize Me – he doesn’t spend the whole movie throwing different facts in your face, he takes you on a journey with him. And over the course of this journey you gain a new understanding of the fast food industry. In Casino Jack and the United States of Money, there is little effort made to entertain the audience, and as a result, the film (it is after all a film, not a persuasive essay) is severely lacking.

Casino Jack makes the unfortunate choice of opening with a quote from an email which reads: ‘Why would you make a documentary? Nobody watches documentaries. You should make an action film!’ The film then begins with a re-enactment of a mob hit. It is the most captivating moment of the entire movie, and it’s not even real. Yes, it’s entertaining while it lasts, but it sets the audience up to expect that the whole movie will follow the same pattern. Which it doesn’t. At all.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t go into it expecting a Bond movie. But aside from some nice moments at the beginning (such as a segment explaining how the corrupt lobbyist and title character Jack Abramoff decided to be a conservative jew at age 12 after seeing Fiddler on the Roof) there’s just not a whole lot of material that is engaging. It’s not relatable, it’s not funny, and a corrupt businessman in Washington isn’t really something new. Casino Jack and the United States of Money would be better suited for its audience if it were a book. The information is all presented rather dryly, very rarely taking full advantage of the medium of film. Aside from audio clips and some (minimally used) footage of Abramoff himself, I can’t think of anything that could not have been conveyed in print, maybe with some inset pictures. The whole point of making a documentary is to provide the audience with information beyond the limits of printed paper, something Casino Jack too rarely does.

The story of Jack Abramoff is an interesting one, however, and Writer/Director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) does a good job of taking us through it from the beginning.

Like Star Wars Episodes I-III, we are shown how a young but driven Padawan can grow into an evil Sith Lord. Sorry about that. To the extent that Casino Jack is a character study, it’s satisfyingly thorough. Gibney uses extensive interviews with people closely involved in different stages of Abramoff’s corruption, to get a real insider’s scoop. Additionally, he shows inflammatory emails sent between the conspiring participants, as read by Stanley Tucci and Paul Rudd. Both actors delivered solid and convincing voice performances, making the crude and offensive language in the messages really stand out, exposing the sick inhumanity for what it was.

As Abramoff was involved in many corrupt backdoor deals, the film is separated into different chapters to keep them all straight. Unfortunately for Gibney, there were about 10 too many of these, and since they all followed a very similar structure, it was a bit frustrating how often the stories repeated themselves, with the victims name copy and pasted in. Also, the mob hit at the beginning was never fully explained. There was a lot of set up that seemed to be leading towards ‘…and Abramoff used his mob connections to have the meddlesome businessman killed,’ though the story never actually took that turn. Because this was discussed towards the end, and never resolved, the film lacked a sense of finality. Nothing new seemed to have been uncovered since the arrest and imprisonment of the men responsible. It was like someone had just read a bunch of magazine articles on the subject, then given me a two hour verbal summary of them. It didn’t help that Gibney would frequently cut to clips from the channel universally acknowledged as the world’s most boring: C-Span (and occasionally C-Span 2).

Casino Jack gives viewers an in depth look into the crook of a lobbyist that was Jack Abramoff. For those who expect nothing more than this, the documentary will leave you satisfied. But for those of us who watch movies for fun, this film leaves plenty to be desired.

Movie Grade: C+
Documentary Grade: B