Casino Jack and the United States of Money Reviews

Alex Gibney remains on top of his game with Casino Jack and the United States of Money, but some of the urgency can't help but seem lost on this particular outing. That's an admittedly strange comment, given that 2010 also saw the release of a feature film about Jack Abramoff, George Hickenlooper's Casino Jack. Yet even Gibney's usual thoroughness and incisiveness can't create the same impact as his previous documentaries, particularly Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side -- which could result from our collective need to move on from Bush-era malfeasance more than a year after George W. left office. Whether Gibney's film was timely or merely an historical footnote, there's no doubt it captures an intricate network of culpability, which may have started out as merely stretching the spirit of the rules, but resulted in outright corruption on a broad scale. Demonstrating his usual commitment to following every lead wherever it takes him, Gibney interviews numerous characters involved in some way with Abramoff's lobbying schemes. Through this he paints a picture of naïfs who didn't recognize that Abramoff was inducing them into wrongdoing, crooks who clearly did, and a lot of folks who fell into the gray area in between. Perhaps the most interesting thing that emerges is the personal narrative of Abramoff himself. Before his lobbying days, his roles were as diverse as chairman of the College National Republicans and producer of Red Scorpion, the anti-Soviet Dolph Lundgren action movie. Even as The United States of Money buries a stake in the heart of Bush-era entitlement, Gibney ends on a note of sardonic irony. With an image of disgraced former congressman Tom DeLay waltzing across the stage on Dancing With the Stars, Gibney seems to wonder, "Who really got the last laugh?"