Films in full

Two For The Money (part four)

2007-12-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

Walter turns up in Brandon’s bedroom and wakes him up. ‘Don’t get excited, all is forgiven,’ he informs his drowsy protégé. Brandon wants to know the time. It’s six in the morning. ‘I gotta fly to Vegas,’ says Walter. ‘Meet with some clients, hand-holding thing. Have to just keep them aboard for the last game, because you can do this thing. End of the season is a perfect place to turn the streak around.’ Walter’s faith in Brandon’s powers simply refuses to wane. He says they’ll go out for a ‘good meal’ when he gets back in the evening, although he doesn’t specify whether he’ll once again part with thousands of pounds so that Brandon can have sex with one of their fellow diners. ‘9.30, Nobu,’ he stipulates. Isn’t that the planet Luke Skywalker’s mum comes from in Star Wars? It certainly doesn’t sound much like a restaurant. ‘We’re turning it around, I’ll see you tonight,’ Walter whispers, homo-erotically.

Nobu. Brandon sits alone until Toni appears, looking stunning. ‘Walter was delayed, he’ll be back in the morning,’ she explains. ‘Asked if I’d fill in.’ ‘You know, it’s funny,’ Brandon muses. ‘He didn’t call me.’ Forget the mother of your daughter Walter, you have to clear things with Brandon first. Toni smiles weakly. He asks if she’s okay, she confirms that she is. She starts to fill Brandon in on Julia’s doings but then breaks down instead. ‘He’s gambling,’ she tells a strangely impassive Brandon. ‘Yep,’ he confirms, nodding his head. He’s just the man you need in a crisis. ‘I just can’t believe I’m here again,’ says Toni, who is apparently a bit of a face at Nobu. ‘I saw it coming, I just couldn’t stop it,’ she adds. ‘I gotta win one more game,’ says Brandon, narcissistically. Talk about making it all about yourself. And, Brandon, one MORE game? When did you last win ANY games? ‘You can’t fix this, Brandon,’ says Toni.

They arrive back at Toni’s and Brandon walks her to the door. ‘Come here for a second,’ he says, and gently whispers, ‘I’m gonna kiss you right now, okay? Trust me on this.’ Not a bad line that, especially by the B-man’s usual standards. They kiss, and head inside. Walter looks on from somewhere, cigarette in hand. That’s a stroke of bad luck.

We watch some of the next scene from Julia’s point of view, as she tapes the action with a camcorder. She urges Walter to open his present. He jokily grabs some foil wrapping paper and feigns delight but Julia corrects his mistake. The real gift is a framed photo (‘Oh man, beautiful,’ says Walt.) of Toni and Julia. Toni is present and correct, and wishes her hubby a ‘happy anniversary’. A knock sounds at the door, I wonder whose presence could add further intrigue to the scene? No, it’s not the hooker Toni found Walter giving money to a while ago, it’s just boring old Brandon. ‘You’re back from Vegas?’ he asks Walter, who invites him to ‘join the celebration’. Brandon wonders what’s happening. ‘Well, Toni and I were married 12 years ago today,’ says Walt. Brandon congratulates them, Walter tells Julia to ‘give mummy her gift’. While she opens it he ‘sings’ what the subtitles inform me is ‘Funeral March’ by Chopin. Characteristically, he then bursts out laughing while the rest of the gathering ignore him. Walter is now in charge of the video camera. Catching Toni’s worried look when she sees her gift, he assures her, ‘It’s okay, baby. I saved for it.’ He’s brought her some ear rings, which he urges her to put on. ‘I got beautiful taste, don’t I?’ Brandon and Toni look a bit awkward. Walter’s got Brandon a present as well. ‘It’s sort of our anniversary anyway, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘They’re made for car racing. The guy who wore this won six straight times at Le Mans. (It’s a smart watch.) Put it on, maybe you’ll start winning again.’ Very bizarre - has the prolific Le Mans winner sold Walter his watch, or does Walt simply mean that he wore that kind of watch, but not literally that exact one? It’s certainly something to ponder. Brandon is reluctant to accept the gift. ‘Why not?’ says Walter, still filming this strained tableau. ‘We all love each other here, right? You’re family. I’m like your father, you’re like my son (he kisses Brandon on the forehead). That would make you his mother, wouldn’t it, Toni?’ Toni looks very pissed off at the Oedipal drama Walter is deliberately concocting. ‘Oh, I said something wrong, didn’t I?’ he says. Toni starts to remove the ear rings but Walter protests. ‘They’re for evening, Walter,’ she explains. ‘So what? Wear them to bed,’ he insists. He then turns to Brandon and asks who he likes ‘in the big game’. Brandon wants Walter to turn off the camera. Walter decides that, like everyone else in the English speaking world, he can wait for the pick. ‘We’ll break it when we do the live TV show’. Is it possible to ‘break’ something which nobody cares about whatsoever?

Brandon stares moddily into the river, then it’s time for ‘The Sports Advisers - LIVE Super Forty Special’ in which ‘John Anthony has his Super Forty selections’. Unfortunately, John Anthony is currently in the bathroom, sweating heavily, as he goes over stat-filled bits of paper in a desperate attempt to finalise his selections. A voice outside informs him that he has two minutes left. Brandon starts throwing up in the toilet, while Walter and Chuck wait patiently on the set. ‘What the hell is he doing?’ asks an exasperated Walter. Brandon is now slumped on the bathroom floor, in a manner eerily reminiscent of my good self after a few too many double whiskies. He ferrets around in his pocket and produces a coin. ‘Heads, New York. Tails, Kansas City,’ he mutters. He tosses the coin. ‘Heads over, tails under,’ he says. He tosses the coin again.

Brandon finally deigns to show up and gives Walter the piece of paper on which he’s scrawled his carefully calculated picks. Walter reads them into his phone. ‘New York, minus one and a half, and the over, 36.’ ‘You wanna know about those picks?’ Brandon says, enigmatically. Walter tells whoever he’s speaking with to wait. ‘What should I know about them?’ ‘I flipped a coin to decide.’ For some reason, Brandon looks quite pleased with himself. You can’t beat a cowardly abdication of personal responsibility. ‘Push it all the way, Southie,’ Walter instructs his phone. Brandon looks surprised, Walter smiles at him. The programme starts and Walter greets ‘everybody’. The good news is that viewing figures have gone up massively of late, the bad news is that’s only because the show has been switched to the comedy channel. ‘Never before, in the history of this industry, has an offer been made like the one I’m about to present to you now,’ says Walter. ‘I am so confident of John Anthony’s picks for this Sunday, I’m so sure of the skills he’s brought to bear, and so anxious for you to get on the phone and dial the toll-free number on your screen, that for the first time in sport service history, I am going to guarantee our picks for this weekend.’ ‘What does that mean?’ asks Brandon. Er, B-man, this is live TV. Save your dumb questions for after the show. ‘What does that mean?’ Walter echoes. ‘It means this. You tell us how much you’re betting with your bookie. You lose, we cover. (Chuck breaks his pencil in disbelief.) You heard me right. That’s risk-free. Now, let’s got to the oracle, God’s gift, John Anthony.’ ‘Wow, that’s all I can say,’ says the oracle. ‘The phones are gonna be flooded Walter, and they should be.’ That’s great John, but I suspect Walt might have wanted a little more, if only to fill the allotted air-time. ‘Hey John,’ says Walter, chattily. ‘Why don’t you run down the pitfalls facing the average bettor? I mean, when you think about it, a game this huge, (with) all the added dynamics, I mean, without your expertise, I guess the average bettor might as well just, what? Flip a coin?’ I accept that this crazy guarantee has enlivened proceedings a shade but the spiel at the top of the show promised ‘John Anthony’s Super Forty selections’, when it seems they are actually only available when you phone the ‘toll-free number’. I maintain that this is the worst programme in the history of television. As for the guarantee itself, it’s patently absurd. The emboldened gamblers will bet millions, which, if the tips prove incorrect, Walter’s company won’t be able to cover, so most of the punters will end up having to fund their own losses anyway.

Outside, Brandon catches up with Walter and tries to dissuade him from this suicidal course of action. ‘If you can flip a coin to make a pick, I can guarantee the game,’ says Walter. This may seem like a non sequitur, but what’s he really saying is: ‘If you can be so irresponsible as to leave a vital decision up to the toss of a coin, I am therefore allowed to be even more irresponsible and risk financial ruin for myself and my loved ones’. Which is stupid, but makes sense. ‘What if we lose?’ Brandon asks. ‘F*** it, I’m ruined anyway,’ says Walter. That’s actually true, so it’s really a bit of a no-loser for Walter. He either goes bankrupt, which is going to happen anyway, or he makes a fortune from winning commissions and saves his business. The only problem is that this course of action, as I mentioned above, could lead to punters losing money when the bankrupt company is unable to refund their stakes as promised. Screw ’em, betting’s a mug’s game! God knows what happens if one of the tips comes in but the other loses. Everyone’s all square? ‘Cover your ass, all right,’ Brandon urges. ‘At least cap the thing out.’ Walter gets out a cigarette. ‘Brandon, can’t you feel it?’ Brandon doesn’t know what he is on about. ‘I think you do,’ says Walter. ‘The best part of the best drug in the world ain’t the high. It’s the moment just before you take it. The dice are dancing on the table. Between now and the time they stop, that’s the greatest high in the world.’ Sounds intoxicating but I’m not sure anti-gambling agencies would look kindly on such talk.

There’s a great hubbub at the office as punters call up, keen not to look an apparent gift horse in the mouth. Various punters are told it’s New York and the over, and that it’s guaranteed. ‘Our reputation is the guarantee,’ Reggie tells a caller who has presumably expressed some of the concerns I’ve been voicing. ‘Twenty-eight years in the business, we’re not going anywhere.’ Brandon looks on nervously from his office. Walt marches down the aisle, currently omnipresent ciggy hanging out of his mouth. He tells his possibly soon-to-be-unemployed minions to ‘kill the phones’. They begin to gather round a TV, as the game is just about to start. Brandon shuts the blinds in his office.

‘Jackson’ gathers in the opening kick-off. As he returns it, Walter moves around as if their movements are synchronised. It’s the first play you buffoon! Last season the Bears ran the opening kick-off back for a touchdown and still got well beaten, so he shouldn’t worry yet, although, in fairness, if your future is literally hanging on the result, then I suppose you’re bound to get pretty wrapped up in it. In any case, the return man is from Kansas, so why Walter is jiggling around as if hoping for a big return is anyone’s guess. Jackson fumbles but Kansas recover, to the disappointment of the viewers. ‘Harris’ then scores a touchdown for Kansas, and again Walter jigs about as if he’s running with him. He should be yelling ‘tackle him’ or some such. Everyone groans with disappointment. Next, Simpson, who is having a superlative post-season, makes a big catch for New York. However, the quarterback follows that by lobbing an interception to ‘Dawkins’. Dawkins runs it all the way back for a touchdown and the outlook is bleak. Kansas City leads 14-0.

Brandon emerges to watch with the group. He puts his hand on Walter’s shoulder. ‘You better hold on to that coin you flipped,’ says Walter. ‘Because, this game keeps up like this, I’m gonna have to borrow it.’ ‘It’s not over yet,’ Brandon points out. ‘I wouldn’t change my bet.’ He heads down to his flat and starts packing his stuff. Finished, he heads out, leaving an letter on the mantelpiece. He hails down a cab as Toni watches him leave, and then puts her head to the wall in a relieved fashion. Why would she just be standing by the window like that? Quite voyeuristic, the Abrams clan.

‘Jones’ runs in a touchdown for New York, and it’s 14-7 as Walter and company exchange high fives. But, as Brandon’s cab pulls up at the airport, ‘Rogers’ scores on a 32-yard run for Kansas. Aren’t these Super Forty players generically named? What happened to Chong, from earlier? It’s 21-10 to Kansas at the end of the third quarter.

More excitement in the office as New York score again to make it 21-17. I don’t catch the name of the scorer but ‘Smith’ or ‘Johnson’ is probably a safe bet. Walter finally notices that Brandon isn’t there, even though he sodded off back when it was 14-0 and there are now only four minutes left.

Walter arrives back at his house and yells, ‘We’re back in it, babe. New York touchdown and we win both bets.’ We hear the commentator in the background, talking about how there are only 58 seconds left. Walt has watched the entire game in his office with the others, but now, with the game reaching a thrilling climax, he heads home to hunt for his wife? He shouts for Brandon too but no one is responding. He finds Brandon’s note, propped up on the box the Le Mans winner’s watch came in. I thought Brandon was living beneath the office, next door to Walter and Toni’s, but, a minute or two ago, it looked like he just walked out of his bedroom and then put his letter on the mantelpiece in the adjacent room. The geography here doesn’t really make sense but I suspect you could care more.

Toni comes wandering in. ‘He left,’ says Walter. She knows. ‘You didn’t tell me?’ he asks. The poor old chap looks genuinely heartbroken. ‘How about that,’ he adds. ‘No goodbye. No nothing.’ Well, nothing except the note Walter is holding in his hand at this very moment, which presumably contains some sort of goodbye-type sentiment. ‘I’m sure it’s all there in the letter,’ says Toni. ‘I’m sure it is,’ agrees Walter, ‘I wonder what’s not in here.’ For her part, Toni wonders what he’s on about. ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’ says Walter, preparing to work himself into a frenzy of rage, instead of watching the last few seconds of the vitally important football game he’s devoted the last three hours or so to. ‘He had enough, Walter,’ says Toni. ‘He wanted his life back.’ Walter wants to know if Brandon ‘said that to you’. ‘Well, loud and clear, by leaving.’ Walter thinks ‘something else’ was behind Brandon’s abrupt departure. Toni seeks further details but Walter plays coy. ‘You have no idea?’ The pair exchange meaningful looks. ‘You’re missing the game, Walter,’ Toni points out. ‘Oh, no. This is the game,’ he retorts.

Brandon walks through the airport, the viewers in the office get excited as Jones secures a first down for New York, but Walter remains too busy rambling on about Brandon to pay much heed to the game which will make or break his company. ‘I guess Brandon was homesick,’ he ruminates. ‘I don’t know. Or maybe he had such deep feelings for me that he couldn’t face saying goodbye.’ Walter, Brandon lives in Las Vegas. This is not the end of ‘Casablanca’, if you want to see him some time in the upcoming week it won’t be a problem. Toni looks horrified for some reason. ‘Wait a minute,’ Walt adds. Something’s just occurred to him. ‘Brandon didn’t tell me he was gonna leave because you let him f*** you.’

In the game, ‘Edwards’ takes it down to the Kansas 44. In the melodramatic soap opera, Toni says ‘Oh God’ and Walter asks if she denies his claim. ‘Do I have to, Walter?’ she wonders. ‘You know you did,’ he says in a hugely annoying tone. ‘Another lock of the year,’ says Toni. ‘I saw you, Toni,’ Walter reports. ‘I saw you and him that night. I never went to Vegas.’ ‘You mean you lied to me about the trip?’ says Toni. ‘Don’t talk to me about lying,’ says Walt, who raises a fair point. ‘I guess you had the whole thing set up,’ Toni counters, still trying to shift the blame. ‘Don’t make this about me,’ he protests, again, pretty fairly. But Toni refuses to relent. ‘(You) just put me out there on a tray?’ ‘I put a tray out there,’ bellows a furious Walter. ‘You didn’t have to shove a f*****g apple in your mouth and sit on it!’ What an appalling metaphor. Edwards catches it and goes down to the Kansas City 23. ‘Admit it!’ Walter barks, petulantly. ‘You played me, Walter,’ Toni whinges. ‘You’re f*****g-A I did,’ he agrees. ‘It worked. Didn’t it?’

The commentator informs us that New York is spending their final time-out, with just eight seconds left. ‘Brandon was right,’ says Toni. ‘But you don’t deny it?’ says stuck-record Walt. ‘It’s the best pick he ever made,’ says Toni, being unnecessarily cryptic to delay unveiling the upcoming, ludicrous, plot twist. Walter doesn’t understand. The New York quarterback has a pass ‘batted down at the line of scrimmage’. Brandon has conveniently arrived at an airport bar just in time to watch the denouement. ‘So, after everything, it all comes down to one final play,’ says the man on the mike. ‘You were gambling with me that night Walter,’ says Toni. Get on with it woman! ‘With me!’ She pats her chest for extra emphasis. ‘Brandon knew it, because he knew you. He told me he was just sure you were watching somehow. So he asked me in to spend the night and put on a little show for you, Walter.’ Well, the mystery of where Brandon’s actually been living deepens. I’m sure they were outside Toni’s door when they kissed. ‘But I didn’t believe him, Walter,’ Toni continues, interminably. ‘Oh God, I didn’t believe him. I mean, after all we’ve been through. So I figure, you know, ‘what the hell?’. He slipped out the back, no big deal. He never even stayed here.’ So, they’re definitely not in the same building. Toni’s ‘he asked me in to spend the night’ was, let’s face it, pretty misleading, unless Brandon invited her to spend the night at her own house. ‘And you,’ Toni adds. ‘You were in such a good mood the next day. I figured, well, ‘Thank God, you know, because he must have been wrong. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he confront us, confront me?’ Oh, Walter.’ You could write about ten pages about how stupid this all is but I’ll try and be brief. Basically, the only reason any of these three idiots would behave as they have done would be in order to set up a dramatic ending to a film. Why did Brandon decide to ‘put on a little show’ for Walter? What point was he trying to make? If he wanted to bring matters to a head regarding Walter’s jealousy, why not just confront him about it? And also, though I’m sure this isn’t the case, Brandon and Toni have created the perfect alibi for themselves. ‘Let’s go in and have sex, and, if Walter has seen us somehow, we’ll just tell him we knew he was watching and we were putting on a show for him.’ Remember that little tactic, adulterers of the world, especially if your partner is pretty credulous.

New York needs a touchdown on the final snap to win (the commentator talks about how players dream of this moment, so we all notice the similarities between this play and the one that Brandon got injured on way back when) and we see Brandon and the office looking on nervously. Sadly, Toni and Walter’s enthralling confrontation is raging on. ‘You wanted to lose!’ she yells at him. ‘Like I was something you could just toss on a table. Only we booked your bet, Walter. Brandon and me, who evidently love you more than you love yourself.’ Walter is speechless for once.

It’s the final play! The quarterback drops back, then takes off running, just like Brandon did. Still, Toni won’t zip it. ‘Your fantasy is to end up alone, with nothing,’ she snarls. ‘I won’t let that happen, Walter, do you understand me?’ Walter must be wondering just how terribly he has to behave to get rid of this broad. The quarterback continues his circuitous, and surprisingly time-consuming progress to the end zone, while Toni smacks Walter and informs him ‘this is real’. ‘You and me and Julia, we’re all that’s real.’ Walter looks contemplative. ‘This is it Walter,’ says Toni and the quarterback, ‘goes airborne from the five. Does he get in?’ What do you reckon?

The office goes wild as the touchdown is confirmed, while, at the airport, Brandon smiles slightly at the crazy vagaries of the sports-tipping world and raises his right arm. More scenes of pandemonium in the office, involving the likes of Chuck and Tammy. Toni mouths ‘Walter’ but we can’t hear it above the epic sweep of the soundtrack. Walter gives in and kneels down on the floor next to Toni. They hug each other, all issues happily resolved. Walter murmurs into Toni’s ear and, yes, a manly tear rolls down his cheek. There wouldn’t have been any issues if they hadn’t acted like such a pair of clowns in the first place but what sort of a film would that have made?

Brandon walks away from the bar, grinning delightedly to himself. It’s all worked out pretty well for everybody except maybe Jerry, who, in essence, lost to his job to someone who then quit himself mere days later, and except maybe the likes of Amir, who lost everything they own on Brandon’s earlier tips, and would have been unable to raise more than a brass farthing to invest on New York in ‘Super Forty’.

Some kids are playing American football while cheerleaders chant in the background. Brandon appears, ball under his arm, whistle round his neck. ‘Giants, with me!’ he shouts. ‘Over here with me.’ He’s a football coach. The youngsters gather round for a pep talk. ‘We got a tough team we’re playing today,’ says Brandon. ‘You all know that. Toughest on our schedule. Now, most important thing we’re gonna do today is have some fun.’ Somehow I wasn’t expecting Brandon to be a foaming-at-the-mouth win-at-all-costs merchant. He waffles on in this ‘have some fun’ vein, then indulges in some back and forth with his charges. They then storm off in rowdy fashion while he grins indulgently. However, one of the ankle-biters has stayed by Brandon’s side. ‘Coach, do you really thing we can win today?’ he enquires. ‘Oh,’ exclaims the B-dog. ‘I’d bet on it.’ In that case, the poor little mites have got absolutely no chance.

Two For The Money (part three)

2007-12-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

As Brandon is putting his clubs in the trunk, Toni comes out of her house and hails him. He wants to know where she’s going, she tells him she’s off to work. He takes her by the hand, compliments her on her appearance and marches her towards his car. ‘Nice ride,’ Toni remarks. I can’t believe she hasn’t seen his car before, considering her and Walter seem to be Brandon’s only friends. He brags about the personalised number plates (‘900 K-I-N-G,’ if you’re a latecomer) as if they’re something to be proud of, rather than the stupidest thing anyone has ever had emblazoned on their vehicle. She gets in, Walter looks on jealously from the office window. No one likes a long commute so you have to admire the way Walter has set up his business in the building right next door to his residence.

Brandon drives Toni to work like a maniac. He’s still pissed off that Walter a) told him to get knotted when he asked for a raise and/or b) paid for a pretty girl to sleep with him without telling Brandon, who thought he had charmed her into the sack until she disabused him of that overly optimistic notion. Or perhaps Brandon couldn’t care less about such matters and is simply trying to impress Toni. ‘You feel that?’ he asks three times, in a steadily rising pitch. Toni wants him to slow down but he refuses to comply: ‘This car was made to go fast.’ He gets a cigar out, tells her to ‘loosen up’ and asks: ‘When you’re not at the salon or running Julia to play dates or keeping Walter in line, which I know is a full-time job, what do you do for you?’ She goes speeding manically around the streets of New York with one of her husband’s idiot employees by the looks of things. ‘I stay busy,’ she responds and tells him he’s got a turn coming up. Why is he driving her to work anyway? She must have her own car, what with Walter’s wedge and all the ‘running Julia to play dates’ to be done, and, unless Brandon is planning on coming back to pick her up again later on, she’s going to end up marooned at work with no easy way to get home. Just thought it was worth mentioning. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Brandon shouts annoyingly, taking the corner like a ‘Wacky Races’ competitor. ‘What do you do for you, for Toni?’ ‘I was a junkie, Brandon, okay?’ she says. I don’t think he wanted to know that either but we have quickly learned that Walter and Toni love to share. ‘So every day I get up and I gotta wonder ‘Is this the day? Is this it? Is this the day I slip? End up back on the street?’ Just keeping it all on track. That’s what I do for me.’ Brandon’s cigar doesn’t appear to be lit but he keeps putting it to his mouth anyway. In the space of half a day he’s metamorphosed into a complete twit. Rather than praise Toni for the way she’s turned her life around, he remarks: ‘Well that’s not living, Toni. That is not living. That is maintaining. That’s cashing in. That is not living.’ A sweet, happy daughter, a marriage and a successful business seemingly aren’t enough for this chump. What the hell does that mean?’ says Toni, then asks if we’re ‘talking perfection here’. Brandon says no and sagely pronounces that ‘nobody’s perfect’. How would you follow up that comment, if you were trying to be the biggest dickhead possible. You could mull it over for hours and I still doubt you could top this beauty: ‘Oh, except for me. Last weekend going 14 and 0, huh?’ Toni, used to dealing with preening alpha males, laughs indulgently, and thanks ‘John’ for the ride as they pull up by the salon.

Walter’s office, a few days later. Walter and Brandon listen to the results coming in. Brandon gets up, ‘I’m gonna go work out.’ ‘No, you’re not,’ says Walter. ‘There’s half a dozen games left. I want you to watch every second of every minute of every one of them. All right, so sit down.’

It’s later on now but our pair of punting prima donnas are still watching American football together. The commentator says something derogatory about Oakland and Walter says ‘Bye-bye’ and switches off the TV. ‘You know how you go three and eleven don’t you?’ Walter asks Brandon, who has dit6ched his cigar and does not look too happy. Clearly, he knows how to go three and eleven, having presumably just done exactly that, but I think Walter’s going to tell him anyway. ‘You go three and eleven when you make Sunday’s picks on Tuesday. ’Cause it rained in Cincinnati on Saturday, (and) two starting quarterbacks never got to play. That’s how you go three and eleven.’ Well, you’re the boss Walter, why didn’t you either ‘put the tips on ice’ as you said you would earlier and force Brandon to revise them later on, or just change some of the more outlandish ones yourself? To only pick three winners out of 14 in a sport where the possibility of a draw is not really in play is, to be honest, unrealistically bad. There must have been some obvious clangers in there. Brandon indulges in a quick spot of straw-clutching: ‘We still got Monday night and the parlay.’ ‘F*** Monday night and f*** the parlay. This isn’t about that. This is about me, isn’t it? It’s about the commission thing.’ Brandon looks very awkward and says he doesn’t know. Savvy businessman Walter decides he should reward Brandon for a feat of tipping which a two-year-old could have bettered. ‘Listen, I’m gonna bump you. Ten percent. Okay? You earned it.’ Brandon is rocking back and forward in his chair nervously, and Walter doesn’t really relax him by adding: ‘This is dangerous territory we’re getting into.’ However, he’s going to give him the rise anyway and wants to know about Monday night. Having lost a fortune following Brandon’s terrible Sunday picks, everybody is apparently going to ‘double down’ on whatever he pulls out of his ass for Monday night. ‘Monday night’s fine,’ says Brandon. ‘You bet your mother’s house on it?’ ‘I don’t bet, Walter.’ However, Brandon assures Walter he is happy with his selection. Walt wants more: ‘On your mother’s house or not?’ ‘With my mother in it.’

Brandon watches the Monday night game in a bar. ‘Another Monday night thriller comes down to the final seconds,’ says the commentator. Brandon looks on as the Carolina return man fumbles a punt and Cleveland recover the ball. Judging by the way a half-smoked stoogie falls out of his mouth, the pained cry of ‘f***’ he emits and the anguished look on his face, that’s not good news for Brandon and his followers. His mobile rings, it’s Walter. Very dramatic, but what has to be said right away about this disastrous turn of events that can’t wait for the morning? Maybe Walter wants to get an early jump on Brandon’s picks for next week?

This reversal of fortune has convinced Brandon to become the hardest worker bee in the hive. We see him buying a stack of sports newspapers and having phone conversations about esoteric American footballing matters. For some unfathomable reason it seems he is now being chauffeured around, and we see a minion hold the back door of the car open for him.

In his office, Brandon pesters a contact (‘Larry’) for information about whether an injury victim will be playing at the weekend. ‘It’s raining, it’s snowing. Can his knee hold up in that?’ Larry reports that ‘the doctor cleared him’. ‘Will the doc let him play?’ barks Brandon. Presumably he will, what else does ‘clearing him’ mean? Perhaps he’s only cleared him to hand out the sports drinks at half-time. ‘Yes, he is a gamer, thank you,’ says Brandon. ‘I can read between the lines, you got it.’ I can’t read between the lines. F*** knows if this character’s going to play or not.

We are treated to a bit of American football action and then arrive at a golf driving range at night time, where Brandon is hitting some balls. ‘Hell of a swing,’ says a just-arriving Walter. ‘Southie told me where I could find you.’ Brandon wanted to ‘clear (his) head’. He asks how they got on. Walter confirms that Brandon hasn’t already seen the results. Walt’s general demeanour suggests that Brandon did not make a spectacular return to form. ‘Highest sales volume ever,’ says Walter. Of course! After some hopeless tipster costs you a packet, the first thing you do is call back in search of a few more tasty nuggets. ‘I think we kicked ass,’ says a confident Brandon, clearly not an expert in body language. He’s pounding golf balls at a very fast pace while this chat goes on. ‘It was amazing,’ says Walter, as if he is agreeing. A grinning Brandon tells him ‘last week was nothing’. ‘You’re right,’ says Walt. ‘It was nothing compared to what we lost today.’ Finally, he has Brandon’s full attention. B wants to know exactly how he did but Walter decides to paint him a little picture of office life beforehand: ‘Grown men crying on the phone, their wives screaming in the background. Three salespeople quit. Couldn’t take the pressure.’ Brandon is bent over, aghast at his monumental incompetence. ‘F***,’ he says, but simply swearing is no longer enough to earn Walter’s amity. ‘You lose ten out of twelve, ‘f***’ doesn’t quite cover it,’ he points out. Again, I think that set of results is terrible almost to the point of impossibility, especially after last week, but I suppose it’s forgivable, in the name of adding a bit of dramatic heft. Walter thinks ‘holy f*****g s***’ or ‘Jesus f****** Christ’ would sum up their situation more adroitly. Brandon puts his golf club away and intimates he’s heard enough. Walter agrees. ‘What’s left to say, except maybe, we keep the phone number, only we switch it over to a f*****g suicide hotline.’ Brandon walks off and Walter shouts, ‘Tomorrow morning, Brandon (we don’t hear much about that John Anthony character these days, do we?). Bright and early, we start all over again.’ Walter refuses to lose faith in his tipping find but if I were him I’d be round Jerry’s at this very moment, with a pre-paid Alexandria in tow.

Brandon cycles around a park. A thug appears from nowhere and barges him off his bike. It’s Benny, Mr Novian’s personal thug. ‘Mr Novian wants to see you,’ he explains, dragging Brandon off. ‘Tell him to call me,’ Brandon wheezes, as the thug manhandles him. No need though, Novian himself hoves into view. ‘I didn’t recognise you without the suit John,’ he remarks. Good job Benny has a better memory for faces or the two of them could have been hanging around all day. ‘This is my time off,’ splutters Brandon, strangely taking the remark at face value instead of as the pointless prelude to a tirade of abuse that it so obviously was. ‘If you wanna talk, make an appointment,’ he adds, though with Benny’s arm around his throat, he is not really negotiating from a position of strength. ‘Or shall I call you Brandon?’ Novian wanders. Not having expected a response to his weak opening line, he ploughs on with his prepared speech. ‘Someone costs you thirty million, you do research, right?’ Brandon now looks terrified as Novian boasts about how he knows all about him, ‘where you live, where you’re from, where your family lives. Hey, your mother, there’s a sweet lady, man. I just come from Vegas. Dealt me three blackjacks in a row, she’s a good woman.’ Brandon tries to attack Novian but Benny restrains him. Novian continues to ponder some of life’s eternal verities: ‘Where’s the cocky motherf***** who came to my house?’ To be fair, it’s easier to be a cocky motherf***** when you’re not lying in mud with Benny’s arm around your throat. ‘Where’s John? What happened to John?’ Brandon suggests Novian should ‘use somebody else’ if he’s not happy with the picks. Benny lifts Brandon to his feet and Novian marches over. ‘I (have) just come for an apology. That’s it. Just look me in the eye and say you’re sorry.’ Brandon does so, but Novian isn’t satisfied. Brandon tries again but an angry Novian tells him he’s ‘not even close’. Benny hauls Brandon down to the ground again. ‘I’m gonna get my satisfaction, God damn it,’ says Novian, not as willing to admit defeat as the Rolling Stones. He gets out a gun and points it at Brandon’s head. Brandon apologises repeatedly. ‘It was a bad f****** weekend man.’ ‘Well, let’s make it a fun day,’ says Novian, proceeding to put his gun away, before urinating all over Brandon. It’s fair to say life in New York’s been something of a roller-coaster ride for the B-man.

We’re on the set of ‘Sports Advisers’ (‘Some businesses piss all over their competitors, but our clients piss on us!’). Jerry wants a word with Walter. ‘I think that I should lead off tonight,’ he says. ‘I got some really strong stuff, man.’ The show’s obviously fairly close to kicking off, but, seeing as the only people who could possibly be watching are extreme sado-masochists, I won’t complain about the way these idiots try to change the running order on the fly when they could have sorted this out hours ago. ‘Jerry, you got a good hole,’ Walter points out. ‘Stay in it.’ Jerry points out that he went ‘eight for twelve last week’. ‘I’m hot, I’m feeling it.’ Walter is unimpressed. ‘You had one good weekend, don’t get pushy.’ Jel objects to being written off as a one-hit wonder. ‘Sykes System revolutionised this industry, man.’ He shows Walter an advert featuring John Anthony. ‘Am I wood (?). Where’s my f*****g ad?’ We all know that Walter doesn’t have the longest fuse and he duly rips the advert from Jerry’s hands and tells him to ‘take a hike’. Jerry is baffled. ‘You’re fired, you’re gone,’ Walter explains. ‘I’m not fired,’ says a laughing Jerry. ‘You need me more than ever.’ Walter gently intimates that he’s not entirely convinced that that is, in fact, the case: ‘Get out of here, you cut-rate parasite.’ I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Walter’s treatment of Jerry is unrealistically appalling. If Walter thinks John Anthony is his top man then more power to his elbow, but he’s gone out of his way to rub Jerry’s nose in it, and resorts to cheap insults when Jerry bridles, or attempts to have a reasoned debate. Jerry tries again, ‘In six years, my worst weekend was never as bad as any of this guy’s last three weeks (we see Brandon looking on from the camera area).’ Walter again tells Jerry he’s out, Jerry wants to know what Walter is doing. I’ve vaguely tried to give Walter the benefit of the doubt before but he loses me for good now by making pained noises and shouting, so everyone within earshot can hear: ‘Am I doing something wrong here? Am I not communicating, is that it?’ He wanders out towards the cameras, where technical types and other hangers-on lurk. ‘You all know what I just did. (To Jerry) I fired you!’ Take careful note of this, all you bosses around the world. If you are ever in the unfortunate position of having to let someone go, and they express disbelief and try to get you to change your mind, don’t even think about offering them any sympathy. Instead, simply hurl abuse at them in front of the rest of the workforce. Yes, we can all agree that Jerry was being a bit juvenile about John Anthony’s preferential treatment but, let’s face it, all the evidence suggests that he’s a solid pro, whereas JA’s a no-hoper who fluked a few good weeks. Wouldn’t you be hacked off? Jerry, stupidly, keeps trying to reason with this buffoon. ‘Come on, this is me, all right? I’ve been here for you. I’m consistent and you know it. The other guys, f*** ’em. They come, they go. I’m the guy.’ ‘No, they don’t. Not him,’ says Walter, pointing at our hero. ‘That’s true talent. Get it? You can’t see it, I can’t explain it to you, that’s why you’re fired.’ I can’t be bothered to rip all that nonsense to shreds. Jerry implores Walt to ‘think about what (he’s) doing’ but Walt’s on a roll. ‘You couldn’t pick your nose without a f*****g computer,’ he says. That’s pretty specious, Walter. Given the chance to talk to someone rational, Jerry would no doubt point out that, over the years, his computer program has been a more accurate forecaster of sports results than human intuition, hence his reliance on it for his selections, with it’s nose-picking qualities simply an added bonus. Walter doesn’t give him time for a rebuttal though, adding: ‘You’re small Jerry. You belong in a can.’ ‘You’ve lost it,’ Jerry observes. Walt again points to John ‘Two winners out of twelve’ Anthony. ‘You don’t touch him. Now why don’t you have some self-respect and leave?’ Jerry is lost for words but eventually storms off, telling Walter he’s ‘out of (his) f*****g mind’. ‘Maybe I am,’ Walter concurs.

Brandon strolls over to Walter. ‘Asshole,’ says Walter, referring, naturally, to Jerry. ‘He doesn’t realise I’m trying to build an empire around you.’ I think he did realise that Walt, hence his displeasure. ‘I hope you do,’ he adds. Poor old Walter, he doesn’t realise that the man he’s anointed as head of his new empire was last spotted being urinated on in the park. Brandon doesn’t have much to say for himself but ambles towards his seat while Walter tells everyone to get back to work. And … we cut away before we get the chance to see how on earth Walt and the wallies explain away last weekend’s fiasco to their single-digit audience.

Brandon is in bed. His phone rings but he ignores it, without even seeing who it is. It’s Alexandria! No, sadly, it’s Walter. Someone knocks on his door and he peers through the peephole. ‘Hey, Toni, this is not a good time.’ She says she is cognisant of that but needs to speak to him about something ‘important’. ‘Not right now,’ he says. ‘Brandon, you have to … You have to go,’ says Toni. Brandon, who seems to be ailing, murmurs, ‘No, I gotta get back on track.’ ‘That won’t matter,’ says Toni. ‘You could win a hundred games in a row and it won’t be enough.’ Toni is clearly dealing in hypotheticals here, the B-man is lucky if he wins one in a row. ‘He will ride you into the ground,’ she adds. She’s trying to protect Brandon from Walter? I can see where she’s coming from but I thought she would be telling him to get lost before his ineptitude costs her husband his business.

Brandon sits in his office in a suit. The phone rings, he answers it. ‘I’m wiped out John,’ says a distressed voice. It’s Amir, he’s calling from a pay-phone. ‘My business, my house, my credit, everything,’ he adds. Brandon assures him it’s all going to be swell. ‘We’re gonna get back on track this weekend.’ ‘Still you talk like this,’ says Amir in accusatory fashion. ‘Who the f*** are you? Like this is some kind of game. You ruined me! I was betting a few thousand a Sunday when I called you but you pushed me, every call, all the time, with your talk. I lost three hundred and eighty thousand this weekend. I was going to get married. I had a life!’ Amir starts crying. You’ve got to sympathise with the old boy but last time we saw him he was living large. I know it’s so very easy to say but why didn’t he scale back a bit when he got well in front? And also, just because some smug tipster tells you to up your stakes to dangerous levels, that doesn’t mean you actually have to. Tell him to get stuffed and bet with money you can afford to lose. Okay, kids! Brandon doesn’t have much to say for himself, which Amir notices too. ‘No more money to squeeze so you shut up,’ he says. It would be funny (and not a little ironic) if his money ran out halfway through his rant at Brandon but this is a serious scene so we can’t have any of that nonsense. ‘How do you f****** live with yourself?’ Amir enquires. He hangs up, Brandon looks pensive.

Brandon works out. I think he’s lifting weights in his suit! He has a Eureka moment and dashes towards Walter’s office, yelling excitedly. ‘I know what the problem is,’ he tells Walter, as he bursts in. The boss is with two men and a load of money. Brandon says he’ll come back but Walter says he’s fine to stay. ‘These guys are finished.’ They leave and Brandon wants to know who they were but Walter is more concerned about his inability to make contact with Brandon and proposes ‘a Bat light or something’ so Brandon knows when his ‘services’ are required. Brandon again asks who the two strangers were. ‘The Salvation Army,’ Walter replies. ‘How does someone go one for eight?’ Sounds like you-know-who is in typical mid-season form. Again, one for eight is beyond ludicrous. It’s the playoffs now, apparently, which are seeded, so if you simply pick the home team, you’re liable to get more picks right than not. ‘A f*****g monkey tossing darts could do better than that,’ says Walter. Brandon wants to know why Walter has so much money lying around but Walt will not be deterred from denigrating his latest calamitous tipping performance. ‘I got a plan,’ he says. ‘We take all your picks, we reverse everything. Like one of them ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes, where everything is opposite. You say black, we say white (we get it Walter).’ ‘How much is that?’ Brandon asks, referring to the dosh. ‘Peanuts,’ says Walter. ‘Two hundred and seventy-five thousand. That’s how desperate I am.’ Brandon wants to know what happened to the ‘two mill’ they won weeks ago. ‘Man, I was carrying twice that in red ink before you even showed up,’ says Walter. ‘Everything you see is smoke and mirrors. I got three mortgages on this house. What do you want to know? I’m gambling again!’ Brandon stares at him moodily. ‘Cover my losses, I just got a loan from a guy who works out of a bar on 106th and Broadway. Trouble with me is, I start betting you heavy after you went a hundred per cent and I rode you right into the f*****g toilet.’ The trouble with this development is that, the week after nailing every result, Brandon arrogantly worked out his tips in about two minutes, and Walter, correctly, criticised him for it. Now we’re supposed to believe that, after watching, and passing comment on, this massive display of hubris, he then ahead and lumped large on the tips anyway? Brandon has an evangelical look in his eye. ‘I’m gonna take care of all this s***,’ he promises. ‘I’m Brandon Lang, all right?’ He burbles on about why changing back to his old identity is the way forward: ‘I’m the kid you called in Las Vegas…I lost something in here…I gotta go back to being me…If I go back to being Brandon …’ ‘You can pick again,’ Walter finishes. He’s on board with the scheme and takes the blame himself, ‘My fault. I f****d with you. Only two games, two winners, two over-unders.’ I think he’s talking about the coming weekend. An insufferable pedant would wonder how eight games (16 teams) reduced the field to a pair of games (four teams) in a week but that’s not how I roll. Walter piles on a bit of pressure about how vital the weekend is, then suggests they get some food but Brandon wants to ‘do some homework’. They hug, they’re both optimistic about the coming weekend.

In his office, Brandon struggles to come up with his picks for the games while the salesmen twiddle their thumbs. Our man lifts weights, shouts things at himself and puts a football to his head. Walter and his team wait patiently in the outer office. For some inexplicable reason, the phone lines aren’t exactly burning up with punters desperate to know what John Anthony’s got for them, although maybe some people have done what Walt said and reversed the picks. They’ll have made a fortune and will be desperate for more. Brandon comes out of the office and gives Walter a piece of paper. ‘Brandon made these picks?’ Walter asks. ‘You’re looking at him,’ is the response. ‘New York and the under, Tennessee and the over,’ Walter announces. ‘Sell ’em hard.’ They’re professional sales people, how does he think they’re going to sell them?

It’s time for the big games and even Julia wants to watch. Walter, Brandon and company are watching the game on a bank of four TV screens, each showing the same pictures. If you want to watch different games, then four screens are obviously great but if only one game is one, wouldn’t you just have one TV on? What do I know, I yearn for the day when I have a bank of four TV screens. Walter tells Julia who to ‘root’ for. ‘We don’t want them, that’s Atlanta.’ Very implausible, this film. Atlanta a game away from the Super Bowl? Not likely. Last I heard their star quarterback was possibly on his way to the slammer. Walter wants New York to win ‘and New York has gotta win by more than five points. Only you gotta root for a low score, okay? Because both teams together have to make less than 42 points, total.’ I’m sure I’ve seen the logistics of a plot point explained to the audience in a more maladroit fashion than a father blatantly stating them to his daughter, who could hardly care less and is likely to skitter off in a few minutes anyway, but I can’t remember when. Still not sure we, I mean, er, Julia, knows what’s what, the writer, I mean, er Walter, says, ‘So it’s New York in under 42 points.’ Julia nods agreeably. Brandon is looking tense.

New York scores a touchdown to ‘take the early lead’, prompting screams of delight from the beer-swilling gathering at Sports Advisers HQ. Chuck is there by the way. I think this film would have been better with more Chuck, and Julia, and Jerry. And less of Brandon, Walter and Toni.

Second quarter, it’s 10-0 New York, but Atlanta scores to make it 10-7. Julia shakes her head in disbelief. I was totally wrong, she’s clearly a huge American football fan. ‘Cong’ (?) throws a touchdown to ‘Simpson’ and New York go 17-7 up.

We skip forward again. Commentator: ‘New York just seconds away for maybe their third trip to the big game.’ The dangerous Simpson catches yet another touchdown for New York. ‘Hello, Super Forty!’ the commentator exults, trying to get round the fact that use of the phrase Super Bowl has obviously been prohibited. That makes it 24-14 and New York have got it in the bag, prompting happy scenes. ‘The boy is back, first of two, baby,’ Reggie says to a still-nervous looking Brandon. But wait, Atlanta are throwing a long bomb on the final play for the hell of it, and a touchdown would get them within five points and take the total over 42, wrecking both Brandon’s tips without altering the result. ‘Knock it down, knock it down,’ says Chuck, so happy to get an audible line he decides to repeat it. Commentator: ‘A wall of blue shirts up there around Jesse Sanchez. It is tipped in the air, it’s still loose, it is bouncing all around. And Peterson comes down with it. He’s at the 20, across the ten. Mackey dives at his ankles to keep him out of the end zone. Well, we end on a meaningless touchdown. Of course, I guess, unless you live in Las Vegas.’ This all plays out to a background of frenzied yelling from Walter’s gang but it’s no good, a freak play has wrecked the party atmosphere. Walter and Brandon look appropriately horrified.

Another commentator informs us that Kansas City caned Tennessee 33-13 in the other match, so Brandon’s definitely got the result wrong, although if the line was 45 or under he’s at least not gone zero for four. Only Walter and Brandon are left in the office. ‘I’m finished Walter,’ says Brandon. ‘Oh that’s great to hear,’ says Walter. ‘Thank God I haven’t alienated my other reliable tipster. Oh s***, wait a minute.’ He doesn’t really say that. ‘I don’t eat, I’m not sleeping,’ Brandon moans. ‘You got a little insomnia, a little indigestion, you’re gonna quit?’ says Walter. That, plus the fact he couldn’t tip the winner of a walkover. ‘What use is John Anthony gonna be to you now anyway?’ Brandon perceptively asks though, as I may have mentioned a few million times, perfect weekend or not, I think most punters would have deserted John Anthony by now anyway, or been forced to by the bankruptcy courts. Walter won’t ‘listen to this defeatist b******t’. ‘They know you went 80 per cent for half a season,’ he points out. ‘They know, and they’re gonna remember as soon as you win a game.’ He’s right. Brandon does at least have the law of averages on his side for ‘Super Forty’. ‘Then we go into March Madness, baseball,’ Walter adds. ‘Next year this time, this won’t even be a memory.’ Brandon wants to know ‘who said anything about next year, Walter?’ ‘You made a career choice buddy, and I bankrolled it,’ says Walt, lighting up a cigarette.

Toni arrives, indicates her displeasure at his smoking, and he tosses it away. ‘Let him go,’ she advises. ‘Of course you stick up for him,’ says Walter. If he seriously thinks his wife wants to get it on with Brandon, then why has he been mentoring the lad? ‘Meaning what?’ asks Toni in resigned fashion. ‘Meaning whose side are you on?’ ‘I didn’t realise I had to choose, Walter.’ Walter turns to Brandon. ‘You’re a champion,’ he informs him, cheerfully flying in the face of public opinion. ‘Champion goes down 86 times, he’s up on the 87th. I’m not gonna let you stay down, no way. Because this is not about you, or you (Toni). Or me. It’s about your gift. Your gift transcends all this s**t. Your gift is cosmic. It’s metaphysic. It’s eternal. It is God! Besides, we have a contract.’ ‘B******t,’ is Brandon’s response. ‘Walter, you can’t own someone,’ Toni points out. ‘Who owns him? I created the greatest sports tout this country’s ever seen. I hooked him up with every major client. I built a f*****g television show around him. I took out full-page ads. I introduced him to the major clients of the world (you’ve said that one Walt, and, considering that they ended up peeing on him, Brandon may not view it as a massive favour). I did that. I hooked you up with everybody. You think you’re gonna walk out that door, take that with you, leave me here holding the f*****g sack? B******t! (To Toni) I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about this s***. What the hell has this got to do with you? You know this is between me and him. What are you doing up in this office? What are you doing here? Get out of here!’ He really is a pleasant fellow. ‘Don’t talk to her like that Walter,’ says Brandon. ‘It’s between me and you.’ ‘Are you telling me how to talk to my wife?’ Walter wonders. ‘You shut your f*****g toilet when I’m talking to her.’ Walter has turned this into a very ugly scene. Toni begs Brandon to leave. He makes to do so but ends up hanging around by the door while Toni gives Walter hell. ‘Listen to me you son of a b****. Don’t you ever talk to me like that, ever.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says Walter, calming down a shade. Brandon takes his leave.

Two For The Money (part two)

2007-11-27T10:22:00.000-08:00

Back in his office, Brandon studies the newspaper. Tammy marches in, looking very hot. ‘His name is Amir,’ she announces, hopping onto Brandon’s desk. ‘He’s a dime bettor. Owns a dry cleaner’s. We got him for the subscription.’ She hands Brandon the details and he murmurs, ‘Amir, single, 102 Fifth Street’. Amir is waiting on line one, according to Tammy, who hops onto Brandon’s lap and plants a lingering smacker on his chops. Yes, we all love Brandon, but he’s such a lucky f****r that I have to admit I’m quite looking forward to his inevitable downfall. ‘Good morning,’ says Brandon when the kissing finally finishes. See what I mean? The man’s banter is truly pathetic. ‘Walter wanted your first call to be special,’ Tammy coos. ‘Go get ’em tiger.’ ‘You got it,’ replies the king of the epigram, before resorting to making bizarre schoolyard noises as he reaches for the phone, while Tammy saunters off.

‘Amir, my man, John Anthony here!’ Amir (Craig Veroni) is in his dry cleaner’s shop, as evidenced by the fact we see him with phone in one hand, freshly-cleaned garment in the other. Brandon launches a charm offensive: ‘Yes, hello to you, sir. How’s your morning going? Mine started off pretty outstanding. But not as outstanding as I plan on my weekend being.’ Outstanding on its own basically means well above the norm, so I can’t see the B-meister’s efforts to introduce gradations of the word catching on.

For some reason, we then cut to the outer office, where there’s a general hubbub as fools are parted with their cash. Back to Brandon, who is trying to persuade Amir to bet big. ‘How much can you lay with your bookie? Twenty grand?’ How much cash does Brandon think the dry-cleaning racket brings in? Amir agrees with me and asks ‘John’ if he’s crazy. ‘Listen, I was betting a thousand a game.’ Brandon couldn’t give a monkey’s. ‘I’ve got a game that I’m calling my lock of the decade. Okay? (Walter comes into the office.) Texas versus O.U.’ JA thinks Texas are going to win the game easily, even though they’re the underdogs. ‘I like Oklahoma in that game,’ Amir protests, although if his own opinions were worth sixpence, I doubt he’d have to phone these self-styled experts to put him straight. Amir tries to wrap up the call but Brandon butts in, ‘Hold that thought, I’ve got Vegas on the line’.

Cut to Reggie barking at some punter. Cut back to Walter leaning over Brandon, fresh back from Mount Sinai with another tablet of sports betting wisdom. ‘The only thing you got to know about any of our clients is that they’re all in the hole. The second they pick up the phone, wham, you got them…Get to the point. You’re above them. Let ’em know it. Let ’em feel it. More John Anthony.’ Brandon gets back to Amir and asks what his favourite drink is. It’s a pina colada. Come on Amir, you’re better than that. Brandon is equally bemused. ‘Tomorrow, we gotta get you a new drink. But today, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna go down to your bookie and lay twenty large on Texas. Then you’re gonna go home, put on your favourite Hawaiian shirt (Walter mouths something and leaves. I’m pretty sure it was ‘I love you’.), and you’re gonna sit back, twirl your little blue umbrella, after you’ve made that little rum concoction that you love so much with the orange slice and the cherry, and you’re gonna watch Texas rip those Oakies a new asshole. And after you win the twenty grand, you’re gonna call me back and you’re gonna tell me ‘Thank you sir. May I have another?’’ If I had thousands of pounds riding on some college football game, I doubt I’d be sitting around drinking pina coladas (afterwards maybe) but Amir seems impressed by Brandon’s braggadocio.

Night seems to have fallen but Brandon is still in his office, marching around with a ball in his hand and telling his customers what’s what on a hands-free gizmo. ‘McNeil’ has apparently lost his dog in a hunting accident so his team should be heavily-backed. ‘You don’t mess with a man who just lost his dog!’ What about the 50-odd players on the other team? Haven’t any of them got any extra motivation? Clearly not, as Brandon tells his mark to ‘Western Union me ten thou by tonight. Let’s ride this wave into Sunday,’ as if he was asking him (or her) to pick up a pint of milk. ‘Denny Boy!’ is next on the line. Remember Brandon’s brother from earlier? He’s told to lump ‘five hundred dollars on the Cheeseheads (Green Bay Packers). Let Stu in on that too and take care of Mama. Talk to you later.’ There’s not much time for small talk in this game! ‘Tammy, who’s on line four?’ Brandon enquires. Ha! I bet (geddit?) she wouldn’t have been so quick to straddle him earlier if she’d known she’d be answering the phone until all hours. Moving on, Bran’s got a real troublemaker here. ‘Forget the other four games you wanted to bet,’ he says in exasperation. ‘Let’s throw that four thousand on this one thousand and make it five, take it money line and turn it into twelve thousand.’ It all seems so simple!

Walter is in his office, football games are on his TV screens. He’s got eight screens, not four, as I wrongly claimed last time. We take a look at an Internet page. It’s ‘The Sports Advisers Exclusive Web Picks’. Brandon’s smiling visage is in the top right-hand corner, while the text on the page informs us: ‘John Anthony. I hit my $50,000. Texas 42 Oklahoma 7.’ That’s a pretty good tip, Amir should be okay for pina coladas for the foreseeable future. ‘Yes!’ says Walter as another game finishes. ‘Good ball game,’ the commentator enthuses. ‘10-7, Oakland upsets New York.’ Brandon no doubt predicted the result, winning margin, first touchdown scorer and the number of times a controversial call went to instant replay. Walter turns off the last TV, a good night’s work completed, but then starts coughing. He’s in a bad way.

At Walter and Toni’s, the lady of the house is on the phone, Brandon is mooching around and Walter is crawling around the house while one of his kids rides on his back, imploring him to speed it up a notch. Walter sees Brandon and addresses him as though he didn’t even know he was there, ‘Hey, ten and two, pro football?’ John Anthony can obviously pop round whenever the hell he likes. ‘85 per cent weekend, you’re a mutant!’ Walter adds. (‘Coming soon: X-Men IIII. The latest strain of good mutants use their uncanny ability to predict the results of trivial sporting events to defeat Magneto once and for all!’) It transpires that Brandon has brought some food round, as a favour to Toni . She gets off the phone and thanks him for saving her life, in the figurative sense. He wants to know what she was yapping about on the phone. Try minding you own business, pal! ‘Walter’s doctor, this is good news, finally put him on an exercise programme,’ she reports. ‘I want to be there the first time he goes to make sure the trainer understands his aversion to consistency.’ Walter’s ‘always been that way’ she adds. Walter, sitting on the floor in an other room, looks on somewhat jealously as Toni and the B-man talk at the kitchen table. I don’t think he can hear that they’re actually discussing him and his highly irritating ways. ‘Well that’s consistent,’ ‘jokes’ Brandon, causing Toni to crack up. ‘You are cute,’ she says, and feeds him something. Walter is horrified.

The Bizarre Love Triangle are now sitting at the table. ‘Life is f*****g good,’ Walter remarks. ‘So, let’s talk about making it better.’ ‘Duck Brandon, here it comes,’ says Toni. ‘I’m thinking of putting John Anthony on TV this week,’ Walter portentously announces, as if putting some clever-dick on a crappy cable TV show will cause a stir akin to Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut. ‘If you do this, from here on out, you’re gonna have to eat, sleep, drink, breathe, talk, walk, and fart John Anthony.’ Toni and Brandon laugh. ‘Just think it over,’ Toni tells Brandon. ‘Don’t decide now.’ F*** me, they’re not asking him to donate a kidney. And, incidentally, as Walter’s employee, if Walt wants him on his show, then he’d better, quite literally, get with the programme. I think the issue they’re trying to stress is that Brandon might find it hard to be ‘John Anthony’ on a more permanent basis but it’s a non-issue as far as I can see and the man himself thinks likewise. ‘Look, it’s the only move,’ he says. ‘It means I got to do a little acting, I’m cool with that.’ Walt won’t have it though. ‘No, no acting. This is living.’ Why, exactly? I’m sure a lot of real-life tipsters have monikers, but that doesn’t mean when they go out for a meal with friends they have to reserve the table under the name Winston Wins-a-lot. Walt won’t do the decent thing and shut it though. ‘From here on out, Brandon Lang and his fettuccini knee and his self-f*****g-pity is as flat dead as Donald Trump’s hair.’ Walt certainly knows how to sell something with sweet talk and I’ve seen no evidence in this film whatsoever of Brandon being at all self-pitying. Yeah , he wanted to get back into football, but he wasn’t moping around, quite the opposite. Walt continues, ‘And John I-can-walk-on-f*****g-water Anthony has taken his place’. That’s pretty funny, but we’re straight back to farce mode as Toni pleads, ‘Listen to what he’s asking you Brandon’. ‘I’m gonna build an empire around you,’ Walter promises. ‘It’s gonna cost me. You understand what I’m saying?’ I don’t, unless he means Jerry and the other tipsters will be pissed off, which they wouldn’t be if he handled the situation with any tact whatsoever. Brandon grins from ear-to-ear. ‘Hell, yeah, I understand. I’m John f*****g Anthony. I’ve got a crystal ball.’

Even though Brandon already looks, somewhat unsurprisingly, like a hugely attractive film star, it’s time for him to be beautified, ready for the limelight. Toni cuts his hair, they have crap banter, Walter buys him a sharp suit, they have crap banter, Brandon buys … a top-of-the-range car! I was going to take the piss out of this but I suppose the brilliant John Anthony can’t be seen driving around town in some old banger. The car salesman asks if Brandon has any credit. Upon being answered in the negative, he speaks sotto voce to Walter. ‘I don’t know, Wally. Can you trust him?’ ‘With my wife, naked,’ replies the ever-confident Wally. ‘The floor is yours,’ the salesman tells Brandon, who points at a tasty silver model.

Brandon pulls up somewhere in his new motor, which has the personalised number plate ‘900 KING’. You don’t have to wait long for your licence plates when you’re the top betting guru in town. The parking valet wants to know what the plate means. ‘That’s me, John Anthony,’ says Brandon, handing him his card and a tip. ‘I don’t lose.’ He is greeted by Walter, who is in typically buoyant mood. ‘I want you to meet Mr Miracle, John Anthony.’ Brandon shakes hands with some big-shots.

Walt’s now in make-up, prior to taping his show. ‘It’s never, ever gonna go down,’ he complains, I think referring to his hair, rather than the fact he went a little overboard on the old Viagra earlier on. The beautician sprays him liberally with aftershave, although I’m not sure the show ‘Mad Walt and his zany soothsayers’ will be airing in smell-o-vision. It transpires that Brandon was sitting in the next chair. He’s looking intensely into a mirror. ‘A star is born today,’ says Walter encouragingly. Bran’s got the sweats on. He’s ‘scared s******s’. ‘You just read off the teleprompter,’ Walter explains. ‘You’ve been here before, kid. Remember football?’ Hey, John Anthony didn’t play any football, that was Mr self-pity Brandon Lang, remember? It’s bizarre how they’re making such a big deal about this TV show. No one watches rubbish like this and, if they do, they’re unlikely to make too much of a fuss about the appearance and delivery style of the assorted presenters. Brandon thinks this is different from football. Too right. In football the quarterback has to play at least reasonably, or there’s a good chance his team will lose, so at least something is at stake, whereas he could go on to this show and do a lame, long-winded Jack Nicholson impersonation and I doubt anyone would give a fig. They’d probably view it as an upgrade when compared with Walter’s monologues. But no, the B-dog is worried because there’s ‘no opponent’. ‘Well then, you’re a lock to win,’ Walter points out. It’s time to get going. ‘Remember, stay with the script,’ is Walter’s parting shot.

The tipping experts sit around, ready for the show, while TV technical types shout things out. ‘John Anthony, huh?’ asks Jerry. Is he coming on to Brandon? (If you haven’t read part one of this marathon, you won’t get that joke.) ‘Yep,’ says Brandon. ‘Alls I see is another wannabe in a thousand dollar suit,’ Jerry remarks. ‘Word to the wise, keep the suit you came in with. All right, Jethro?’ ‘Jethro?’ How many pseudonyms has Brandon got? He smirks smugly and says he’ll do that, while we hear a woman say ‘good luck to you’. I think it’s someone (Toni? Tammy?) speaking into Brandon’s earpiece.

The show starts. ‘Welcome to this week’s edition of ‘Sports Advisers’,’ says Walter. He introduces himself, ‘Jerry Sykes, Chuck Adler (Charles Carroll) and a truly gifted newcomer to the Sports Advisers panel. I want you to meet him, a substantial find, and his name is Brandon Lang … I mean, er, John Anthony.’ Okay, okay, he doesn’t really mess it up like that. Brandon nods arrogantly into the camera. Walter engages full-on twitter mode. It’s week six in professional football and thinks are getting really ‘hot’. ‘This is oven mitt time, am I right?’ Well, we’d better hear from the ‘Wizard of Odds, Jerry ‘The Source’ Sykes,’ in that case. Jerry launches into his spiel. While each of the panel speak, by the way, TV viewers see the number they can call ‘1-800-BET-ON-IT’ beneath them, plus some encouraging blurb on the crawl: ‘Call now for your free picks etc’. Jerry’s evidently got some computer programme with which he makes his predictions. ‘The Sykes System uses 42 proven indexes to eliminate the guesswork in sports wagering.’ This is all news to us, of course, but regular viewers, if that’s not an oxymoron, must have to listen to the same old bull every week. Without Jerry’s ‘computer-based picks, you gotta a better shot of having God show up at you door with nine strippers, a bag of pure Bolivian cocaine (we see Walter laugh indulgently, though I can’t believe the FCC welcome this sort of material), enough Viagra to make Chuck’s head blow up, than picking these things on your own. You call me, absolutely free, I got five picks this weekend that are incredible.’ Speaking of Chuck, it’s time to hear his sales pitch. ‘How many gamblers did I bail out last weekend with my game of the year?’ He recounts how some of his clients struck it rich, his face turning an alarming shade of red as he does so. He’s got six games this weekend, he’s releasing them free, blah blah blah. I can see how people like Amir might give John Anthony kick-backs to keep the tips coming but what’s with all this giving some of the tips away for free? Can’t people just keep calling back with a different name or maybe this is just a one-week thing? I’m probably over-thinking it.

Chuck exudes confidence about his selections. ‘These games are a burial, a blow-out, a human lock! You can bet your children’s unborn children’s children on these six games absolutely free!’ Chuck is yelling incoherently by the end of this rant, and the final two words would be unintelligible without subtitles. He has turned purple, but at least it’s a bit of entertainment for the viewers. ‘I believe, I believe,’ says Walter. ‘I believe you’re trying to make me deaf.’ Brandon laughs, Chuck cackles strangely and Jerry points out the unusual colour he’s gone. ‘Is that, would you say, that’s kind of a chartreuse?’ Not really, you prat. Chartreuse is yellowish-green, old Chuck’s now more of a maroon hue. Back to Walt, who helpfully reminds viewers that ‘Saturday comes before Sunday,’ which means college football, which means it’s Brandon’s chance to shine. ‘Thank you, Walter,’ he says. ‘This is John Anthony here.’ He spouts some drivel. ‘From Wall Street to Tokyo to Hollywood, all your big money is gonna stay and play with me That’s right, that’s why they call me the Million Dollar Man.’ Yep, I expect the guys were sitting around the office one day, and Walter said ‘What about this John Anthony character?’ and Jerry replied ‘Well, from Wall Street to Tokyo to Hollywod, all the big money stays and plays with him,’ to which Chuck exclaims, ‘That’s right! We should call him the Million Dollar Man from now on!’ Walter must have written this script, it’s beyond dire. Brandon realises this too and his voice trails off. Oh no, his TV debut is going to end in ignominy! ‘I can’t say that, man,’ he remarks. Jerry looks pleased and Walter is about to tell the techies to cut but Brandon recovers. ‘Somebody wrote some very clever stuff for me here like the ‘Million Dollar Man’.’ I think he’s taking tongue-in-cheek. ‘So let’s just call me John.’ Walter tells the cameras to start rolling again, if they ever stopped. Brandon continues: ‘I played quarterback, Division One. And every QB knows that the secret, the key, to victory, is anticipation. The ability to see the future and react to it. Now, that is what I do. And that is the truth. So I’m not gonna sell you today, all right? I’m just gonna tell you the facts. For over one year, I have been picking 80 per cent winners (way to not sell them Bran!). Unbelievable? Used to be. I know the leagues. I know the teams. I know these players. I know this wonderful game called football. Call the number on the bottom of your screen and ask for John. Let’s make some money.’ He grins ingratiatingly into the camera.

Walter gets home, looks in on his daughter (Julia - Chrislyn Austin) and then starts wheezing unhealthily. Toni wakes up and informs him that it’s 4am but Walter’s on a high after the show. ‘Man, you should have seen him.’ Walt, we all enjoyed Chuck practically self-combusting but I’m not sure it was worthy of a 4am bender, unless … you’re not talking about someone else are you? ‘I just sat there and watched him roll. I swear, he made me want to pick up a phone and call. (He laughs.) I took all the sales boys down to Smith and Wo’s, you know, get them primed for the weekend.’ That doesn’t sound like an optimal management strategy to me as the staff will be nursing hangovers and doing sweet FA all day tomorrow but Walt knows best. Anyway, ‘Chuck got so drunk he took a swing at one of the deer heads on the wall’. Now that’s a good scene, why can’t we view it for ourselves, instead of having it relayed to us by some drunkard? Walt cackles with glee, Toni smiles indulgently. ‘I’m gonna hire more guys on Monday,’ Walter adds. ‘I got to. I gotta get more phones.’ Unbelievably, with his gorgeous wife beckoning him to bed, Walt will not shut up about Brandon. ‘I’m going to do this whole dot-com thing around him, you know?’ But we’ve already seen a web page with Brandon’s grinning mug on it. Maybe Walt’s going to expand that side of his operation? He burbles on about how Brandon is his ‘protégé’. ‘If anything happens to me, he steps in.’ He gestures to his heart, to indicate the fact that his scenario is sadly not very far-fetched. ‘It’s like having a son.’ Toni again tries to entice him into bed but Walter is in that sozzled state where the most asinine ideas seem perfectly reasonable, and announces that he’s ‘gonna go for a run’. Walter changes into his gear while eulogising about his work-out but Toni cunningly gets him to lie down ‘for one minute’ and he gradually passes out while she whisper soothingly to him. Fair play to Toni, I can’t see many women showing such forbearance when their hubby wakes them up at four in the morning spewing nonsense.

Brandon’s office, Jerry bursts in. ‘You know anything about Stokey being out this weekend against New York?’ Brandon’s reading the paper in relaxed fashion and is more concerned about Jezzer’s office etiquette. ‘A knock would be nice, Jerry.’ The J-man points out that he’s ‘kind of underwater here, man’. Brandon doesn’t know anything about the Stokey situation. Jerry says that if he does hear anything, then he’s got to spill the beans to Jerry. ‘’Cause that’s the way we work.’ ‘I’ll rush right over,’ Brandon deadpans. ‘Stat.’ It transpires that Jerry’s concerns about Stokey are the tip of a mightily pissed-off iceberg. ‘I been working here for six years, you been doing it for one,’ he snarls, pointing aggressively at Brandon, but Walter comes in and cuts him off before he can really hit his stride. ‘What are you doing in here? Hit the phones, man.’ It seems Jerry’s tips have been driving people towards the Samaritans in their droves because Walter advises him to ‘do some damage control, rewrite that frigging computer programme’. Jerry is incredulous. ‘Hey, it was a f****d weekend.’ ‘For some people,’ Walter retorts. ‘There’s a fifty dime bettor on line three, he wants to talk to John Anthony.’ Brandon asks for more info. ‘His name’s Carl, he’s a gazillionaire. He owns a couple of dozen McDonald’s franchises.’ This news adds yet more grist to Jerry’s mill of fury. ‘I landed that lead. He’s my guy.’ Walter continues to treat his former top man with complete contempt. ‘Was. (He) Was your guy.’ ‘He’s raiding my lists now?’ Jerry asks. Surely it’s time for Walt to put his arm around him, lead him somewhere private, and gently explain that, with John Anthony on a hot streak, it’s natural for some clients to seek his counsel, and that they’ll no doubt be back with Jerry when his own form changes? Instead Walter opts for the more confrontational: ‘Your clients are jumping ship, you lactose-intolerant f***! Get out of my sight. Come on.’ Brandon ‘helps’ matters by saying excuse me and gesturing towards his phone.

Toni and Julia arrive home, Julia goes upstairs to play. Walter emerges from a room at the end of the hall with a nubile woman in tow. He gives her money for ‘cab fare’ and greets Toni pleasantly before claiming the awkward situation is easily explainable and introducing Toni to ‘Gail’. Toni looks very angry, as Gail leaves, saying she’ll talk to Walter later. It’s all so blatant that there is obviously nothing going on between them but Toni is fuming. ‘What the hell’s going on here Walter?’ Walt is surprised by her hostility. ‘I just brought her up here to pay her off,’ he says. ‘I got her for John. Come on!’ Toni is furious and whirls around, pointing her finger at him. ‘Don’t b******t me, Walter!’ she advises. Walter laughs disbelievingly. ‘You can’t be serious. You think I slept with this girl?’ He’s got a point, even Walter wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring a hooker he’d procured for himself back to the house with wife and daughter expected back at any time. ‘Who the hell’s John? Who’s John?’ says Toni, who is unrealistically lacking in street-savvy in this scene. It’s not as if Brandon/John isn’t all Walter ever talks about, plus it was her who made such a fuss regarding Brandon’s identity switch in the first place. Walter says all that far more succinctly. ‘John. John Anthony. Ring a bell?’ ‘You got Brandon a hooker?’ Walter explains his rationale: ‘He’s working late at night. He’s in a new city. He has no friends.’ I would love to shout Walter down here but I once moved to a completely different part of the country for a new job and did not receive a paid-for prostitute into the bargain. Quite frankly, I’d have considered it a thoughtful gesture. Toni is horrified, though. ‘Are we actually gonna stand here and have this conversation? Are you completely, completely clueless, Walter?’ Walter is genuinely baffled by her reaction and accuses her of being ‘jealous’. Never a smart move. He continues on the attack, ‘Are you jealous? You look jealous to me,’ so Toni asks what he’s on about. ‘I don’t know, Brandon getting laid or something?’ About five paragraphs ago this pair were ranting on about how Brandon, to all intents and purposes, was dead. Looks like he’s risen again. Toni thinks Walter is ‘crazy … ’cause that sick thought never entered my mind.’ ‘That’s not where those thoughts enter,’ says Walter. Toni storms off, as Walter shouts out, ‘You’ll be happy to know he didn’t sleep with her. I just paid her for coming. Pardon the pun.’ She wheels around in anger yet again but the nipper comes charging down the corridor before Toni can tear strips off Walter. The Brandon-Toni-Walter thing really is tiresome and I fear the worst is yet to come.

We watch an advert for the ‘Sports Advisers’ TV show. ‘New star’ John Anthony ‘went an amazing 24 and six in last weekend’s games’. On the set, it’s time for Jerry to receive his latest f***-you pill. ‘John’s up first tonight,’ Walter tells him. A less shrewd man-manager might have told Jerry hours, rather than seconds, before the show starts, so he had time to get used to his new place in the pecking order, but why do that when you can let the rancour and bitterness which you have created seep into the show? Jerry thinks he may have misheard. ‘What?’ ‘John Anthony is leading off tonight.’ ‘John Anthony’s leading off?’ True to form, Walter quickly tires of this and starts to belittle Jerry. ‘There an echo in here? Engineer? Sound? Help me. I’m hearing everything twice.’ Jez is appalled by his treatment. ‘Two years I lead off for you and you bury me in the deck over a couple of lousy f*****g weekends? This is b******t Walter.’ There’s no time for Walter to respond because the show is starting. I hate to be so pedantic but it’s simply ludicrous that he would tell Jerry about this 30 seconds before the show starts. It makes Walter look stupidly capricious and idiotic, which he can’t be to have built up a (relatively) successful business.

Later on, Brandon talks to Denny on his mobile. Denny has furnished the car he’s working on with a very loud stereo, I think purchased by Brandon, which he now plays for his brother’s delectation. ‘It is the bomb, B!’ Brandon loves it too, then asks if ‘everything else (is) cool?’. ‘Did Dad reach you?’ Denny enquires. He did not. ‘He saw you on TV and he wants to talk to you,’ says Denny. As we know from the film’s opening, ‘dad’ is something of a deadbeat, but I still can’t believe he watches that moronic show. ‘I gave him your work number but he says they won’t put him through,’ Denny adds. Brandon looks over to see Walter talking to Chuck. He says he’ll ‘check into it’.

Boring Love Triangle. Walter is indulging in his favourite activity, namely heaping overwrought praise on Brandon. He refers to Brandon as ‘Jimmy the Greek’, a reference to American sports betting legend Jimmy Snyder, and adds: ‘He makes Nostra-f******-damus look like a novelty act.’ I think we should call Brandon Nostra-dumbass. Toni laughs at these inanities as they emerge onto the street but Brandon has the hump because his old man is being given the bum’s rush. ‘Have you been blocking any of my calls?’ he wonders, taking the circuitous route. ‘Of course,’ says Walter. ‘You don’t need distractions right now, my boy. Lot of crazies out there.’ Brandon doesn’t take kindly to this response. ‘Does that include my father?’ Walter pauses for a second but is undaunted. ‘You’re asking me, I’m gonna tell you. Yeah.’ ‘You son of a bitch,’ says Brandon. It turns out that pops has been trying to get through for a fortnight or so. Walter, completely unapologetic, wants to know if Brandon would ‘have taken the call if I put it through?’ Blimey, Walt’s such a hands-on boss he even mans the phone banks, no wonder he hasn’t got time to cosset prima donnas like Jerry. ‘That’s not the point,’ Brandon insists, marching off. Walter, intransigent to the last, marches after him, demanding to know what’s going on with Brandon and his old man. ‘Hey man, I was just trying to spare you something.’ Walter has the unfortunate habit of infuriating people to such an extent that they wheel round mid-stride and get in his face. ‘What are you gonna spare me from, huh?’ asks Brandon, not entirely cordially. ‘He was a goddamn drunk. Left when I was nine. I couldn’t compete with the bottle, end of f*****g story. You don’t spare me nothing. If I want to talk to him, I will.’ He ambles off again, muttering: ‘Spare me. You f***.’

Literally every single one of the billions of other people who inhabit this planet would have either left Brandon to walk off at this point or perhaps even shouted out an apology for their insensitivity. But Walter’s definitely a bit of a ‘has to have the last word’ merchant. ‘Is that it?’ he barks. ‘Is that all you got?’ He rushes to catch up with Brandon. ‘Because I will match my dysfunctional childhood and Toni’s against yours, any day of the week.’ If the scene had finished at the end of the last paragraph it would have been a rock-solid addition to the film but this little coda is beyond ridiculous. Did I miss the bit where Brandon bragged to Walter and Toni about how he had by far the most dysfunctional childhood. No, I did not. He’s not complaining about his rubbish childhood, he’s complaining about Walter taking a decision which was Brandon’s to take. I think the screenplay writer just wanted to give Pacino as many grandstanding speeches as possible. ‘My father, five foot, arms like this,’ he reports. ‘He had a cock like a Hebrew National. I even looked at him the wrong way he smacked me across the room like Jake LaMotta.’ He continues in this vein, then asks Toni to join in. Instead of pointing out that Brandon wasn’t trying to instigate a ‘who had the worst childhood’ debate and telling her deluded husband to shut it, she remarks: ‘I didn’t have a great childhood either Brandon.’ Well, whoopee, everyone had a bad childhood! Brandon’s pissed off that Walter’s been blocking calls from his father, these two decide to throw a pity party. ‘Tell (Brandon) about the uncle,’ Walter insists. ‘Well, I think he gets the idea now,’ says Toni. He certainly does, that’ll teach Brandon to loudly proclaim that he had the worst childhood in the history of mankind. Walter angrily (!) tells Brandon that Toni was ‘abused by everybody but the family pet’. Obviously, I’m not making light of such horrendous happenings, but they could either have been shoehorned in more artfully or, better yet, we could have guessed from some of the more subtle hints that have been dropped, that Walt and Toni have had it tough. More from Walt: ‘Your father was a drunk. He was a jerk. So what? It happens. I’m glad I blocked those calls. You know why? You need a new image of a man. How about me?’ Toni laughs and Brandon, smiling now, remarks: ‘That’s a scary f*****g thought.’ That no swearing thing has gone out the window good and proper.

Still Walter won’t put a cork in it! ‘The s**t that happened to you, to me, to Toni, you know what that is? It’s just that, s*** that happened.’ Thank you Descartes. I don’t remember Brandon saying anything different, by the way. HE’S JUST ANGRY THAT YOU WERE BLOCKING CALLS FROM HIS FATHER! ‘We’re all f****d up,’ Walter adds. ‘We are all just so f****d up. Now you gotta just say that s**t out. I am f****d up, and I ain’t gonna take it anymore.’ Is that a knowing parody of the famous line in ‘Network’ (‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore’) or is the screenwriter genuinely trying to pass this off as original thought. Walter gets Toni to join them and shouts ‘We are so f****d up, we’re not gonna take it anymore.’ He yells it again. Someone from the building they are alongside shouts down, ‘I’m trying to sleep here asshole!’ ‘That you Dad?’ Walter ‘humorously’ responds as a laughing Toni ushers him away. The irate building dweller hurls abuse at him, while I’m left to wonder why on earth I spent so much time on that hugely irritating scene.

We cut to the office. While an elderly gent measure his leg, Brandon is on the phone to Amir, and he’s not happy with what he’s hearing. ‘You’re going to sit here and haggle with me over fifty grand after the two hundred and fifty thousand I just made you last weekend?’ Things are on the up for Amir. We see him standing by what looks like a brand new sports car. ‘Fifty thousand seems slightly steep,’ to him. Brandon is marching around smoking a cigar while he reminds Amir about their first conversation. ‘You’re in a hole the size of the Grand Canyon, you’re crying to me about having to hock your fiancee’s ring. Now, today, you’re calling me from a red convertible F1 Ferrari.’ Divulging that nugget of info was a definite error on Amir’s part. Brandon threatens to cut him off and says he’s considering charging Amir ‘a ten per cent aggravation tax’. Brandon’s bottom line? ‘Wire me seventy-five grand and maybe we can kiss and make up.’ Amir acquiesces.

Time for B’s next caller. ‘John Anthony, talk to ME!’ he bellows annoyingly. It’s his mum, wanting to know how he’s getting on. ‘Mum, I have never been better. I’m kicking ass and taking names. Listen, did you get the money that I sent you?’ Someone close to his mother, as Brandon clearly is, would surely phone her up fairly regularly, but the tenor of this conversation suggests they’ve barely spoken since he moved away. Ridiculous. Brandon is planning to fly mum and Denny out ‘next month, first class. I’m gonna put you up at The Plaza. You’re gonna meet Toni, you’re gonna meet Water’. Mum’s in a for a rare treat. She protests that he’s sending too much money. Brandon thinks otherwise. ‘I made that money, I earned that money. Every f*****g cent of it!’ I don’t think she was hinting that the money came from disreputable sources and she’s unimpressed by new-model foul-mouthed Brandon. ‘It’s just how people talk out here,’ he says. He’s hardly moved to New York from a haven of clean living, he was formerly resident in Vegas for Pete’s sake. He tries to wind up the call while patronisingly saying ‘no cuff Francisco’ to the tailor but mum wants to know about ‘this John Anthony person’. Brandon explains that John Anthony is the reason for the cheques coming her way as Walter bursts in. ‘We gotta go to Puerto Rico,’ he says. Brandon puts his mum on hold and asks the reason for the trip. ‘C.M. Novian just called, he lives in Puerto Rico. He’s the biggest sports bettor in the world. We have hit the jackpot. He wants to sit down and talk, in person, with John Anthony.’ They’ve got 45 minutes. Brandon tries to get his mum back on the line but she’s hung up. Bit harsh that Mrs Lang. Granted, Brandon was a bit curt but, to be fair, cheques in the post, first class trips to New York? The boy’s doing his best! I think that we’re supposed to think it would be better if the family was still mired in poverty, if it meant Brandon didn’t say f*** every now and again. Anyway, Brandon is upset by this turn of events.

The tipping twins have now arrived in Puerto Rico. Walter tells Brandon about Novian. ‘He’s a world-class prick. Wouldn’t return my phone call. Treated me worse than my Hong Kong tailor. You know how long I’ve been trying to bag this guy? Have you any idea what this thing is worth?’ Brandon does not but wants a bonus if it all goes swimmingly. Walter briefly turns into Yoda from the Star Wars films: ‘No ‘if’. It’s only ‘when’.’ Walter gives Brandon a pep talk, then starts tottering around and struggling for breath. Brandon holds onto him as he collapses to the ground. ‘Is it your heart?’ asks Brandon. Brilliant diagnosis Dr Kildaire. ‘Where’s your vial? Easy, easy. (To concerned onlookers) Get me a doctor and get me some water, now.’ He gives Walter a couple of pills and tells him to ‘suck on them, man’. Wouldn’t swallowing them be more efficacious? Wide-eyed Walt manages to speak. ‘You love me?’ ‘You know I love you. You know I love you. You ain’t going nowhere.’

Tense music ratchets up the excitement, as Walter fights for his life. ‘Would you love me if this was a joke?’ he asks. ‘I’m okay. I was just practicing.’ That Walter, he’s incorrigible! He gets up and assures the onlookers that he’s fine. ‘Little indigestion. Too many peanuts on the plane.’ Brandon is, naturally, volcanically pissed off. Come on Brandon, practice makes perfect! ‘That’s pushing it too far,’ he tells Walter, who now has to sweet-talk his way out of trouble yet again. ‘You pay attention to me right now. There’s no such thing as ‘too far’. Understand? You push everything as far as you can…’ Blah blah blah, keep pushing, ‘remember that when you’re with this guy today’. What would he have come up with if Brandon hadn‘t made the ‘too far‘ remark? And is pulling such a lunatic stunt the best way to prepare for such a vital business meeting? And isn’t it time I stopped questioning Walter’s crazy methodology and just went with the flow?
The betting buddies arrive at Novian’s impressive dwelling. The man himself (Armand Assante) arrives and greets Walter, who introduces John Anthony. Once everybody is seated, Novian points out that ‘these sports services of yours, (are a) complete f*****g scam, huh?’ Brandon laughs and Walter joins in. Novian asks for Walter’s system but Brandon chimes in. ‘Let’s start with how much you bet.’ ‘A million a game, across the board,’ says Novian. Brandon nods. ‘Is that our ceiling here? Is that the most we’re working with?’ It’s Novian’s turn to laugh, ‘Oh, it depends. I mean, s***, Benny (he turns to a grinning henchman), check your wallet. See if you’ve got any cash hanging around.’ Novian is keen to get onto the upcoming weekend’s betting good things but Brandon gestures towards a yacht and wants to know if Novian rents it. He doesn’t, he owns it. ‘That’s how I feel about this weekend,’ says B, ‘And I’m not being cocky. I’m talking straight commerce with you, Mr Novian. I didn’t come down here to b******t you.’ ‘Wow, you got steam,’ says Novian, bewilderingly impressed by this speech. Did he expect John Anthony to say that he didn’t have a clue who was going to win at the weekend? ‘I know these teams better than they know themselves,’ Brandon continues. ‘I’m going twelve for twelve this weekend and that includes the Monday Night parlay.’ Monday night par-tay, more like, if you follow Brandon’s tips! Novian asks for Walter’s take. ‘I don’t believe him,’ says Walt. ‘You cannot afford not to,’ says Brandon. Novian says that actually he can afford not to. ‘Can anyone afford to lose as much as a man like you needs to bet to actually feel a win?’ Brandon muses. It’s not quite ‘To be or not to be,’ but it’s certainly a fascinating philosophical debate. ‘Winning’s a funny thing,’ Brandon continues. ‘It’s one of those rare commodities on earth that money cannot buy, until you called me.’ ‘I didn’t call you, I called your boss,’ Novian points out. Brandon is in bullish mood. ‘And he called me,’ he barks. ‘The price is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars up front, plus ten per cent of every game you win.’ Novian thinks such a proposition is ‘wild’ and looks at Walter for support. Walt gives him a blank look. Novian checks with his henchman that he ‘never paid up front before’. H-Man shakes his head. ‘We’ve never charged it before,’ Brandon informs him, as Walter puts his sunglasses on in the background for some reason. Is he trying to intimidate the billionaire? ‘But considering whose picks you’re getting,’ Brandon drones on, ‘and the amount of money that you’re betting, Mr Novian, two-fifty’s a bargain. You know it and I know it. If you want this weekend’s winners, that’s my offer. You can take it or leave it.’ ‘Let’s step outside,’ says Novian, after brief deliberation. There’s one born every minute!

Back at base camp, Brandon is deliberating over his picks at his desk. A nervous minion comes in to tell him that ‘they need it, Mr Anthony’. A propos apparently nothing, Brandon asks ‘Mitchell’ what his mother’s name is. It’s Sheila. ‘What street did you grow up on?’ ‘Atlantic Avenue.’ ‘Who do you like Monday night?’ Mitchell has not got a Scooby. ‘Pick one,’ Brandon encourages him. ‘Well, that’s your job,’ Mitch counters. ‘I’ll do your job tomorrow,’ Brandon lies. ‘Today, you do mine. Who do you like?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ Mitch asks nervously, and truth be told, rather dumbly. He’s asking who you think is going to win the Monday night game Mitch. ‘Mitchie,’ Brandon wheedles amusingly, ‘Seattle versus New Orleans. Stop stalling. Who do you like?’ Mitch looks back into the outer office for some reason, then again professes ignorance, before finally caving in. ‘I guess I like Seattle, plus the two points.’ Brandon circles Seattle but he’s still not satisfied. ‘Over or under?’ ‘You can’t do that,’ says Mitch, alarmed that thousands of pounds are going to be wagered on the basis of his half-baked opinions. ‘No, I can do this,’ says Brandon tetchily. ‘Over or under? It’s 44 points. Come on.’ ‘Over?’ Mitch ventures. Brandon fills in his sheet accordingly and hands it to Mitch, who echoes my earlier point. ‘I’m not going to hand that in, there’s, like, a million dollars riding on that game.’ Mitch, if this arrogant son of a gun wants to use your tips, then so be it. He’ll be the one who takes the fall. ‘Oh, there’s like a whole lot more than that,’ says Brandon, the epitome of smug complacency. ‘Look, we all know I can pick. Today, I’m picking you. The outcome will be the same.’ ‘And what if I’m wrong?’ Mitch wants to know. ‘There’s no ‘if’,’ Brandon replies. I think he’s trying to out-Yoda Walter from the airport scene, but, if you think about it, what he’s just said implies that Mitchie will definitely be wrong. Nice try though, B.

Walter and his staff are watching an American Football game in a state of high anxiety. ‘They score, we win,’ Walter repeats over and over, as we see Brandon look on from the back of the room. It’s the Seattle Monday night game - Mitch’s handiwork. Touchdown Seattle! The two teams on the TV look nothing like Seattle or New Orleans, so it’s safe to say the NFL have not collaborated on this film, understandably I suppose, given it’s betting theme. The office celebrates, led, as ever, by Walter, who yells: ‘We won a hundred-f*****g-per cent!’ He does a comical dance of joy while Brandon takes the congratulations.

Later on, the party is in full swing, and Mitch is telling an interested throng how he was the man behind it all. ‘It was like he mesmerised me a little bit, you know? And then, like Spock or something, I just visualised it. Seattle and the over. And he just wrote it down. I mean, he just said, picking me was like the same thing as him doing it.’ Ha, ha! It was like getting blood out of a stone as well, but don’t mention that old son. To add to the hilarity, Jerry emerges from a room next to the group as Mitch finishes recounting his exploits.

Walter is counting out money and Brandon raises a glass to him from across the room. Uh oh, here comes Jerry. However, he seems to be oozing bonhomie. ‘Congratulations Brandon, or, should I say, John?’ he remarks, drunkenly putting his arm round Brandon. ‘Either way, it’s amazing. I am very impressed. Are you kidding me? Letting salesman make your picks? That’s balls.’ To be ultra-picky, I feel like, in a really great film, we’d have just seen Jerry overhear Mitch’s bragging, look a bit hacked off, and not hear anymore about it. Brandon tells Jerry he should head over to where Walter seems to be blithely handing out cash to all and sundry. ‘With the way you’re picking, you’re gonna need some for a rainy day,’ he can’t resist adding. But Jez has some words of warning: ‘Gambling Gods, (are a) fickle bunch, so easily offended.’ Brandon makes noises of acknowledgement while staring vacantly into space.

Walter sits on a desk holding wads of cash. ‘I tell you,’ he tells everyone within earshot. ‘There might be businesses (in which) you can make more than two million dollars in a weekend (Brandon thanks Jerry for ‘looking after’ him in the background.) but will somebody tell me, somebody please tell me, where else you can have this much f****** fun?’ He throws the money into the air in delight. Brandon comes over. ‘You the man, big papi,’ he tells Walter. ‘I love you forever,’ says Walter as they embrace. Or until he has a bad couple of weeks and some hot-shot new kid comes along, Jerry might ruefully remark. Instead we just see him watching on like a Shakespearean villain from the corner. ‘How much of that Dough-Re-Mi be for moi?’ Brandon asks Walter. ‘How about a one, with five zeroes behind it?’ suggests Walt. ‘A hundred thousand?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘On two mill?’ ‘You be working out of my shop.’ Brandon concurs: ‘This is your place. It’s your shop, Walter’s shop. I understand that. I’m just saying, feed the horse, baby. Maybe ten per cent?’ ‘Ten per cent?’ Walter literally finds this a laughable suggestion. He tells Brandon to forget it but our man ain’t leaving until he’s got a pay rise. ‘We got Novian. We got the two hundred and fifty grand …’ An angry Walter grabs him round the neck before he can continue. ‘I want to tell you something now, okay? I’m gonna say it only once. If you want something more from me than a gesundheit after a sneeze you’re gonna have to do more than come to me with this s***. You understand? You’re gonna have to earn it. And once you earn it, you’re gonna have to fight me for it. You’re gonna have to challenge me. You’re gonna have to rip it out of my f*****g talons. That’s how you get ahead with me. Now, John Anthony would know that, see? As a matter of fact, next time you come to me with this s***, you come as John Anthony. I ain’t talking money with you.’
I can’t believe I transcribed that risible speech. For starters, I’d say ‘John Anthony’ would have asked for more cash in exactly the same way that Brandon did but, more importantly, why is Walter such a w****r about everything? After all the stuff about how much he loves Brandon, he speaks to him like this? Yes, Brandon’s being greedy and ungrateful but he’s young and over-excited after, let’s not forget, landing Walter his biggest client ever and then picking the winner of every single game, massively enriching his employer in the process. Do: Put your arm round the kid, tell him that’s not how it works, remind him how you plucked him from obscurity in Vegas and tell him that, if he keeps coming up with the goods, he’ll be rewarded. Don’t: Start mouthing off about f*****g talons. Anyway, Brandon edges backwards, glaring at Walter, as a cheerful Toni bursts in and congratulates him. He raises his arms, tells her he’s ‘winning’ and departs. Walter asks Toni to dance with him. They kiss happily and Walter talks crap about extravagant things he’s going to buy, while Toni, as per, laughs happily, even though his remarks aren’t funny in the slightest. ‘Just tell me you’re not gambling Walter,’ says Toni. ‘Eighteen years straight, okay? That s***’s over,’ he assures her, angrily. ‘It’s never over,’ she tells him. ‘How about a truth serum in the veins,’ he belligerently suggests. I’m sure we’re not supposed to find Walter this obnoxious. He wants to ‘just enjoy a dance,’ and she hugs him in a desperate attempt to shut him up.

Brandon decides to give Alexandria a call. ‘I happen to be in the neighbourhood.’ She meets him in the lobby and he informs her that she has ‘a Doberman for a doorman’. He kisses her but she looks perplexed. ‘What are you doing here?’ He suggests they go out for a ‘late-night dinner, right now. Have a couple of killer bottles of wine, go back to that place where we first met’. This point is about to be made redundant anyway, but going back to the place you first met is something couples usually do after they’ve then been out a few more times. You don’t generally sleep with someone, fail to get in touch with them for a few weeks, then turn up out of the blue and suggest returning to where you first met, as if it’s a fantastically romantic idea. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Alexandria wonders. ‘I live in this building, asshole. This is home. I don’t appreciate you stopping by without calling.’ It’s a tad tricky to get on board with this, seeing as … he did call! She could have just told him to get knotted on the phone if she so desired. It’s Brandon’s turn to be baffled so she makes ‘this s*** real clear, so this doesn’t happen again. You meant five thousand bucks. Your friend set it up.’ She stalks off, Brandon looks gob smacked. Expensive old night for Walt that one, and you have to admire his generosity. He lost ten large in a bet with Brandon, having already paid five large to ensure he lost. I take it all back, I want Walter as my next boss!

At the office, presumably the next day, Brandon is clapped in by the staff and graciously raises his hand in acknowledgement. He finds Walter in his office, demanding to know if Brandon is aware of the time. ‘It is 8.37 in the am,’ says Brandon. Nope, it’s time to press, according to Walt. ‘When you’re winning, you press, you don’t rest on your laurels.’ Brandon gets his golf clubs out. ‘Got a ten-thirty tee-time at Wingfoot with a client, that Howell guy,’ he informs Walter. ‘So don’t call me unless the lines change, you got it?’ Walter doesn’t like this one little bit. ‘The salmon are running, my man. You gotta stay here… You can’t go out playing golf, having fun.’ ‘Fun? Senor, you have obviously never played Wingfoot,’ Brandon jokes. Walter wants Brandon to stay but Brandon is a changed man. ‘I’m not asking you if I can leave, Walter. I’m telling you. (He puts his hand on Walter’s cheek.) That’s how it is, all right?’ For once, Walter is silent. Brandon asks if Walter wants his picks, then starts working on them. ‘You’re gonna start picking on Tuesday for the weekend, huh?’ says Walter, unhappily. Walt, you’re only reaping what you sowed, although I’m not sure if this rebellious Brandon is a consequence of the money dispute or the fact Walter paid for him to sleep with Alexandria. If the latter, well, I suppose it would be a bit of a blow to Brandon’s ego that a gorgeous woman who he thought had succumbed to his charm, actually had to be paid five grand to put up with him. On the other hand, Alexandria’s very hot, he got to sleep with her, and there’s no denying old Walt meant well. Why does this particular stunt go beyond the pale, considering everything else he’s pulled? Brandon continues to make his picks, muttering team names to himself and basically paying them scant attention. Walt tries again: ‘You know, we’re gonna be advising somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty million dollars this week.’ ‘That’s a nice neighbourhood,’ says Brandon, barely listening. ‘We should be doing double that by week ten, Walter.’ Walter’s still unhappy about Brandon’s nonchalant approach to his picks. ‘No study, no analysis. You’re just gonna pick ’em.’ ‘Locked in, Walter,’ Brandon explains. ‘I don’t really need it.’ He hands over the picks. ‘Now, if you want next week’s picks, I can give you those by Friday. You want to join us, you can.’ ‘No, I’m starting to get the drift here. I tell you what, we’ll keep these picks on ice and go over them tomorrow, okay?’ Brandon puts on his sunglasses. ‘I won’t be in tomorrow.’ ‘Well then, the next day,’ Walter pleads. ‘Ahhh, we’ll talk about it,’ says Brandon, well on his way to the exit. Throughout the film, Walter has flown into a fury at the slightest provocation, but now Brandon waltzes in, acts like he owns the place, and Walt doesn’t really say s***. Who kidnapped angry Walt?

Two For The Money (part one)

2007-11-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

Who enjoyed ‘Wall Street’? Anyone eager to hear about its sports-betting equivalent in laborious detail? Great, let’s crack on.

The action gets underway in an unrealistically deserted park, where a young boy stands, baseball bat aloft under the shade of a tree, preparing to receive a pitch from his old man. We are informed that TFTM is ‘inspired by a true story’ although, as you will see, the melodramatic nature of events suggests liberal artistic interpretation has been utilised. As we zoom in on the youngster, a voiceover, currently en vogue at the start of films, kicks in. ‘That’s me (cut to pops, about to unfurl an underarm lob) and that’s my dad. (The blonde-haired tyke, a leftie, smacks the ball miles) I remember that day. And believe it or not, I remember that hit. I remember it because of the smile that spread over my dad’s face.’ With no one else in the park on what looks like a beautiful autumn day, the long walk to fetch the ball should wipe the inane grin off dad’s face. Next, we see the nipper miss a shot on a basketball court, ‘Yeah, I’d have stood there all day just to sink one. Just to see that smile (this time, we see dad looking pissed off and taking a sip from a can of beer). You see, to Pop, sports were a religion. To me, it was about purity (now, they’re playing American Football, and our young pal, dressed in full regalia, including a helmet, is going deep alongside the family dog, while dad drops back to pass. Needless to say, no one else is anywhere to be seen). Sports was a place where all wrongs could be made right. I though if I filled the house with trophies for him (dad launches it long) he’d stick around. Well, I did. He left before my tenth birthday.’ I don’t want to start on a captious note but it’s a pretty precocious eight- or nine-year old who equates his own sporting success with family stability.

We don’t even get to see whether he catches the long bomb because it’s time to move on a few years, to a big college football game. ‘The Conference Championship has come down to this final play,’ a commentator reports. ‘The Sun Devils trail by four. The ball on the Aztec 15, seven seconds left on the clock.’ The crowd are at fever pitch, while on the sidelines our world-weary young friend has metamorphosed into long-haired, bandana-sporting quarterback Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey), who is spitting out water and getting instructions from his coach. ‘Now, settle it down. Pro right tiger. This is your game!’ Brandon arrives at the huddle and wastes no time in revealing his cocky persona. ‘Here we go, men. Last play, it’s fun time. Pro right tiger, wide check, 532 double fly, on two, Scottie. (He gestures to the planned recipient of the pass.) Guaranteed TD. We gotta worry about one thing, men. After we win this game, they’re gonna be putting cameras in your faces. Don’t be giving them any ‘Hi Moms’ and s***, it’s overused. You got to thank somebody? Thank me. See you in the end zone men!’ As he prepares to take the snap, we get another Brandon voiceover. ‘I’d been a quarterback since Pee Wee football. Set high school records, won state championships. This was perfect. (We watch in slow-motion as Brandon walks up to the line, talking ‘smack’ at one of his opponents as he does so.) Bowl game, national TV, there were pro scouts in the stands. And I knew exactly what was gonna happen next.’ The commentator burbles (‘Lang has led the Sun Devils to four fourth-quarter comebacks this season. Can he do it, win their first bowl game in 12 years?) and the play eventually gets going. Lang drops back to pass (‘He’s looking for Ravis on the right side’) but finds one of the opposing defenders (‘Sherman’) in his face and takes off running with the ball. As the commentator goes bananas, Brandon produces a nice little spin move to elude a would-be tackler and dives into the end-zone for the winning touchdown, while about three men tackle him at the same time. Unfortunately, as he dives, we hear the sickening sound of a limb being bent in the wrong direction. I hope Brandon’s not hurt! Voiceover time: ‘My first thought was, I could tape it and play next week (isn’t a Bowl game always the last game of the season?). Then I puked.’ We are treated to an unpleasant shot of Brandon flat on his back in the end zone, with his right leg below the knee, positioned at a 45 degree angle to the rest of his body. He won’t be playing next week.

Brandon is stretchered to an operating theatre. Inside, he asks, ‘When do I play again, Doc? What’s the rehab time?’ ‘I’m not sure son.’ Brandon looks, understandably, very worried, as various medical types bustle around him.

We skip forward once again and voiceover Brandon has yet more plot details to impart. ‘Football wasn’t a sport. It was my life. And I wasn’t gonna give up, no (we look down on a large open-plan office, split into small cubicles). I would play again. In the meantime, I needed a job to hold me over between tryouts. Then one day, and it didn’t take long, six years had passed and I woke up at the bottom.’ You might be thinking something along the lines of ‘A job’s a job, and anything that doesn’t involve trawling through sewage hardly constitutes ‘the bottom’’ but Brandon wasn’t lying, as we discover when we pay a visit to his cubicle. ‘You have reached the Jessica Simpson hotline,’ this shorter-haired Brandon says into a recorder. ‘Jessica’s going to tell you a little bit about Nick’s surprise birthday party and a whole lot more about her rocking new panty line at Wal-Mart. But first, here’s a little fan trivia to win a VIP Gold Package backstage pass to Jessica’s Omnicon Hotel’s Summer Tour.’ However, before Jessica Simpson fans can have their knowledge of the great lady tested, Brandon is interrupted by his boss. ‘Bauer’s sick, I can’t update his betting line. You know anything about sports?’ Brandon gets the job and, for the umpteenth time in just the first five minutes, we are treated to a voiceover explaining exactly what it entails. ‘900 numbers, audio text, the racket had a lot of names. This guy’s gig was sports handicapping. Predicting winners for people who bet. I was supposed to just record his picks. Thing was, I didn’t agree with them.’ Brandon, pen in hand, shakes his head as he examines Bauer’s apparently laughable selections. Considering his own sports star background and his unbridled self-confidence, might he not have suggested something like this would suit him better than recounting Jessica Simpson’s itinerary before now anyway? Back to VO: ‘Living in Las Vegas, it was easy to gauge the temperature of the betting public. The problem with the betting public is they’re usually wrong.’

Brandon seems to have swiftly played Lou Gehrig to Bauer’s Wally Pipp because we next find him striding into a gambling hall, demanding information on the ‘action this weekend’ from some bloke behind the counter called Stu. ‘We’re getting big money on Tampa-Oakland,’ Stu informs him. ‘Everyone’s jumping on Oakland right now.’ ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ says Brandon, in condescending sing-song tones. Stu is intrigued. ‘That game’s going to be won by coaching,’ Brandon explains. ‘Look, Gruden put that Oakland team together before he came to Tampa, right? (In a transparent bid for authenticity, the screenwriter here uses the exact scenario from the 2003 Super Bowl, right down to using the same teams and the real-life men involved.) He knows every strength and every weakness. He knows Brown only likes to catch the ball over his left shoulder. So he’s gonna have him double-teamed to the defender’s right. He also knows Gannon only throws on a three-step drop. So he’s going to stack the middle of the field with linebackers, take away the short pass. Gannon’s gonna throw three, maybe four INTs Sunday.’ ‘F*** me,’ is Stu’s verbose response. He’s on Oakland in a big way and Brandon has convinced him of the error of his ways. ‘I think I’m gonna save your ass one more time,’ our hero announces. ‘Take Tampa Bay, money line. They’re gonna win this game outright. Bet them, bet them big.’ ‘Thanks B,’ says Stu. It’s ….. voiceover time! ‘Stu did bet them big, and he won ten grand. I was quickly becoming the biggest 900 line in Las Vegas.’

Back in his cubicle, Brandon is tossing a football up and down and taping his latest nuggets. Finished, he hands the tape to his boss and collects his wage packet, with which he quibbles. ‘Steve, I went nine and two in pro football Sunday and hit my third straight Monday night parlay. It’s worth 12 bucks an hour.’ ‘Hey, I don’t make 12 bucks an hour.’ ‘You’re not picking 75 per cent,’ says Brandon, smiling confidently, as if this clinches the argument. Steve thinks otherwise. ‘Well if you’re that good, why don’t you bet your own game? Get rich. Send me a postcard from the Riviera.’ Point well made, Steve. I like a flutter myself every now and again but I’d never phone up some tipster for advice. The real betting experts are languishing on beaches in the Bahamas enjoying the fruits of their success, not wasting their time taping phone messages for the common herd.

Brandon cycles home and finds his brother Denny (James Kirk) with his head under a car bonnet. Him and his pal seem to be souping up some old banger and they rev up the engine to show Brandon their progress. Denny literally howls in delight. Inside, Brandon’s mother is running late and hunting for her ‘lucky crucifix’. She tells Brandon he has a letter from Chicago. ‘You just went there for your tryout last week.’ Brandon’s no mug and could probably have connected he dots on that one by himself but it’s nice of her to keep the audience in the picture. Now, who haven’t we heard from for, what, two minutes? Brandon’s expositional voiceover of course. ‘Another rejection letter. ‘Strength of your knee in question’. Let’s see, I only had two Arena teams left (shot of Brandon lifting some weights). And I guess, well, after that, there was always the CFL.’

Not sure yet whether Brandon is the brash, self-confident type? The upcoming, otherwise completely pointless scene should serve to convince you. Bicycling Brandon pulls up next to an attractive woman, who has the top down on her convertible. The fact the cars all have their headlights on and that there are drops of rain on her bonnet suggest she’s playing a dicey game with the weather. ‘So what do you think?’ Brandon enquires. ‘Should I ride shotgun or do you want to hop on the handlebars? (She laughs in disbelief.) Hey, the packaging is not great but I guarantee you there’s a prize on the inside. What do you say?’ Despite the fact his lines a) aren’t even vaguely amusing and b) don’t really make sense, she laughs and gives him a nice smile before driving off. ‘You’ll be back. I’ll have a life,’ he bellows after her.

At work, Brandon cycles (?) down the aisle and stops at his cubicle, where the phone is ringing. He greets a co-worker and answers it. ‘Congratulations,’ rasps a voice familiar to cinema-goers the world over. ‘You went nine and two last Sunday. This is Walter Abrams (Al Pacino). I don’t know if you know me but I run the biggest sports service in the country and I’m a big fan of yours, Brandon. As a matter of fact, I got a poster of you on my wall.’ Brandon suspects a prank but Walter wants to give him a job and tells him to open his top drawer, wherein lies ‘travel cash and an airline ticket’. ‘I paid someone to put it there, who incidentally told me that the place you’re in reminded him of a Turkish prison (thanks partly to the grimy lighting they’re using, Brandon’s workplace does look hugely uninviting, but I can’t believe Turkish convicts get away with wearing surfer dude gear and cycling to and from their cells). Now, all I’m asking you to do is come up with a number. You write down the number of what you make now, you cross it out. You write what you should be making and then you toss in how much it’s going to take to get you to fly to New York, first class, and come work for me.’ As Brandon gets scribbling, well-informed Walt continues his sales pitch. ‘With your bum knee, a comeback is just a dream. My offer is real.’ Brandon has written down ‘250/week (but hasn’t crossed it out as instructed), 700, 1500’. Walter then takes another call, giving voiceover Brandon an opportunity to mull his options. ‘With mum holding two jobs and Denny wanting to go to college this looked like a chance to make some real money. And besides, I’d never seen New York and New York had never seen me. (We are shown a plane touching down and then Brandon admiring some pretty girls, who are going the opposite way on the conveyor belt walkway at the airport. Of course, you simply never see pretty girls on the conveyor belt walkway at airports except in New York).’

Having been collected at the airport, Brandon asks the driver how long he’s worked for Walter. ‘Long time,’ says the smiling driver. ‘Two weeks!’ Brandon is naturally surprised but is informed that ‘every day with Walter is an adventure’. The driver creases up with laughter and smacks the wheel in delight.

They arrive outside the offices and Brandon takes a look around, before smiling approvingly, even though there’s nothing remarkable about the street or offices whatsoever. Inside, he finds Walter on the telephone, and, as luck would have it, he just happens to be having a telephone conversation which encapsulates his entire personality! ‘All right, double it. Triple it. No, everything’s about money. Listen, this Sunday, my little girl, an angel, turns six. This is not likely to happen again. She loves elephants, your circus has ten, I only need one. Now, my little girl’s happiness is in your hands. (Pause.) I don’t need parenting advice from a guy who doubles as a clown. I need a f***ing elephant. Now, I’m willing to pay. What’ll it take to grease your wheels and get one here this weekend?’ The putative elephant provider hangs up. Walters does likewise, swears and barks out ‘Find Ringling Brothers. Get someone on the phone who understands profit,’ before finally acknowledging Brandon with an enthusiastic ‘Whoa!’. Bizarrely impressed by the pachyderm-related prattling, a grinning Brandon introduces himself. ‘The Marlboro Man here,’ says Walter (he is besuited, Brandon is wearing jeans and a suede jacket). It’s the very definition of love at first sight, as Walter informs Brandon that he’s ‘in great shape,’ although, when Brandon mildly suggests otherwise, Walter is less impressed. ‘Modesty, not a virtue, could be a vice,’ he points out. Brandon sits down as Walter waffles about his ‘rules to success’. ‘Rule number one is: know what you know, know what you don’t know and know that I gotta know everything you know as soon as you know it. Sooner.’ If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that old chestnut! Walter elicits from Brandon that he has not ‘sold’ before and that he believes in God. ‘Hey, Liz,’ Walter shouts to his secretary. ‘This is me 30 years ago, right? It’s remarkable, the resemblance.’ Liz goes along with it, Brandon laps it up, Walt reaches for a ciggy. ‘I’m not supposed to do this, it’s bad for my condition.’

Returning to business, he asks about Brandon’s work in Vegas. ‘Just the 900 recordings. You know, ten bucks a call.’ Walter is unimpressed. ‘That’s chump change. I mean, we’re going after much bigger fish here. You know, networks don’t talk about it. Government can’t tax it. But sports betting is a two hundred billion dollar a year business.’ Brandon is impressed. Walter witters on about how gamblers ‘have needs, and come Monday morning, after a losing weekend, they got big needs. Gargantuan.’ Walter flicks a switch and a bank of TV screens on the wall start showing sporting events. ‘That’s every football game last Sunday,’ he brags, although there are only four screens, and there are 30-odd teams in the NFL. He goes on to claim Monday Night Football is the most watched game of the week because ‘Monday’s the last chance bettors have to climb out of the hole they got themselves in’. Brandon nods curtly, perhaps aware that this long seminar about sports betting is more for our benefit than his own. ‘Sports betting is illegal in 49 states, including this one,’ Walter smugly continues. ‘But what we do, is not. We are one hundred per cent legal, (Brandon is genuinely, and justifiably, looking quite bored now) like stock brokers. Only instead of touting stocks, we advise people on how to bet. Now, if a client wins by taking our advice, we get a percentage, or we ask for one, which they will gladly give us, because they want to keep getting the advice. But if they lose, we get zip.’ Brandon looks like he’s about to lapse into a catatonic stupor, even though Walter is outlining his business plan as if it’s the greatest idea mankind has ever managed to formulate. Still he rants, ‘So the object here, my dear, tall, athletic, religious friend (!), is to win.’ ‘I can do that,’ says Brandon laconically, Walter takes a contemplative puff on his cigarette. Vocal cords worn out by his interminable lecture, he flicks a switch and the screens now show … Walter presenting his sports betting TV show. ‘Hello. This is Walter Abrams,’ says on-screen Walter. ‘Hello, Walter,’ shouts ‘sitting in office’ Walter excitedly. He’s definitely got a screw loose. ‘That’s my cable show,’ he tells Brandon. On-screen Walter is certainly no impostor because he starts yabbering away in already painfully familiar fashion: ‘Now, after a nice five-day vacation on my yacht, you can see the tan …’. But we cut back to ‘sitting in office’ Walter, who for some reason thinks Brandon might want to highlight this inane show in his TV guide. ‘Airs Saturday and Sunday morning, nationwide. We tape Thursday and Friday … What’s going on with my hair?’ He yells out to Liz his unhappiness regarding the hair situ. ‘I got one part of my head in Cleveland, the other’s in Chicago.’ Walter wants his barber ‘dead’.

His on-screen self is informing the viewers about his plans to give away ‘our three-team college and pro parlays absolutely free’. You don’t hear the term ‘parlay’ much in British betting vernacular but it basically means a bet where the winnings from one segment go on to the next bet, so, in this case, I think if all three of the teams win, then you’re in clover. Unlikely, with this snake oil salesman touting them, however. Brandon spots an error in the watertight business model. ‘If all the picks are free, how’d you get the yacht?’ ‘There’s no yacht,’ says Walter. ‘Why give any picks for free?’ Brandon persists, unfamiliar with even the simplest business concepts. ‘Why not charge a fee up front?’ Walter: ‘You make a good point. Next.’ That’s a terrible point, it‘s not even really a point! ! I’m (clearly) no business expert but it’s basic strategy to get people hooked by giving away your product and then starting to charge for it. Brandon wants to know what’s on the second floor. ‘That’s where we print the money.’ Brandon finds this enormously amusing. He’s got no more impertinent questions, which gives Walter a chance to eulogise him further. ‘You and me. This thing’s going to work.’ They’re both looking forward to it. Liz has got the ‘Ringling Brothers’ on the line for Walter. He tells them to wait and asks Brandon if he’s had a manicure. Brandon’s brief glance at his finger nails is answer enough. ‘There’s a girl you gotta meet,’ says Walter, handing Brandon a piece of paper. ‘What’s she like?’ ‘She’s beautiful. You’re gonna like her. (He picks up the phone.) Is this Barnum or Bailey?’ Ho, ho. That’s the way to get your elephant Walt.

For some reason, you need immaculate finger and toe nails to be a true sports betting savant. Brandon sits in a salon with cotton wool around his toes, while a beautician prepares his nails. The gorgeous Toni Morrow (Rene Russo) comes over, introduces herself and takes over on the nails. ‘Nice to meet you,’ says Brandon lasciviously. ‘Walter said you’d stop by,’ she says. Brandon: ‘This was his idea.’ Toni says she knows, in put-upon fashion. It’s obvious to all of us that she’s Walter’s girlfriend or something but not to Brandon. Let’s hope he doesn’t make a fool of himself by asking her out, eh? ‘Does he make all of his employees do this?’ he enquires. Yes, he does. ‘Once. Before they start work.’ Brandon, quite rightly, finds such a policy odd. Toni compliments him on his ‘strong hands’. ‘Do you drink?’ she then asks. Brandon is taken aback by the question. ‘I have a beer every once in a while.’ She wants to know if he smokes. He doesn’t, he says, grinning. ‘What about gambling?’ ‘What about it?’ Toni realises her interrogatory method is somewhat brusque, and apologises, ‘I’m a little bit pressed for time here. I asked, do you bet, are you a bettor?’ ‘No.’ She is surprised and wants to know why not.

Uh oh, Brandon’s had enough of the small talk and leans towards her, while unleashing a line which I must try myself, such is it’s poetic brilliance … ‘Toni, huh?’ To be fair, if you look like Brandon does, simply saying a woman’s name in a suggestive fashion is actually probably going above and beyond what is strictly necessary to win her affections. He demands to know if Toni is at the salon full time. ‘This is my shop. I better be,’ she replies. She returns to the issue of Brandon’s non-gambling. ‘Well, I did once,’ he concedes. ‘I wagered everything I had and I lost…I swore I’d never do it again.’ ‘And you’re sticking to that story?’ He is indeed. ‘I’m not going to start this relationship off by lying, Toni.’ She’s pleased, ‘Walter could definitely use someone with a little resolve in his life.’ Until that remark, Brandon’s lecherous behaviour can be easily forgiven, but surely now her obvious familiarity with Walter will throw up a few red flags. ‘Fraid not. Brandon grabs her hand and asks if she wants ‘dinner with (him) tonight?’ She smiles. ‘He didn’t tell you.’ ‘Tell me what?’ ‘Brandon, Walter and I are married.’ The situation’s crying out for a quick-thinking Brandon to say ‘Oh, yeah, he told me that. Now, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?’ but he actually tops that by pulling a hilarious face, making a funny noise and remarking ‘Oh, bogey.’ They have a good laugh at Walter’s behaviour. ‘I’m gonna kill him when I get home,’ says Toni. Nonetheless, ‘He has a big, bright beautiful spirit though and you will love working for him. But he is held together by meetings. If it has ‘anonymous’ at the end, he goes. He has to. He also has to be very careful who he lets into his life. In most ways, Walter is brilliant. But he can be bulls******, and I can’t. So he sends them to me before he hires them.’ Quick-on-the-draw Brandon works out that this is ‘(his) interview’. He wants feedback. ‘Except for an illegal forward pass, I would say perfect. Congratulations.’ I’d hate to see the other muppets she’s interviewed if Brandon is truly worthy of such rave reviews.

After a short clip of Walter trying to suck in mug punters on his two-bit TV show, we find the sorcerer showing his apprentice around the office. ‘This is the first floor, and it’s all yours. That TV’s satellite and it swivels (how thrilling!). There’s your bedroom. You got a Jacuzzi in there the size of a kiddie pool.’ A Jacuzzi in the bedroom? I’ve simply got to get into this sports betting lark. Brandon flukes a few winners on some obscure phone line and now he’s getting the whole floor of an office block to live in? There’s even a gym in there. Walter has Brandon’s ‘copy’ on a piece of paper, which he puts on Brandon’s desk. He’s ready to talk turkey but Brandon’s still in ecstasy about his new digs. ‘Walter, this is sweet ass,’ he observes. He sits down at his desk. ‘I’m gonna start you on the 900 numbers,’ Walter explains. ‘You make your picks, you record them each day, Monday through Friday, once a day, five times a day on the weekend…Each call is worth twenty-five bucks a shot. We’re doing about three dozen hits a week, that’s nothing. We should triple that.’ Water the Wise gets serious. He has ‘a few words for (Brandon)’. ‘You pitch sucks, no offence,’ he points out. ‘But you got potential, so we got to find a way to bust you out.’ Walter wants to give Brandon ‘a new name’. Brandon, as usual when Walter’s on a roll, doesn’t have much to say for himself. ‘John Anthony. Just came to me,’ Walt announces. Brandon laughs. ‘John Anthony,’ his new mentor continues. ‘The Million Dollar Man.’ Brandon wants to know why he can’t use his own name. ‘He’s still living with his mommy,’ Walter ‘explains’. ‘John Anthony’s living large. He don’t hold back. He’s got a direct line to God. (Ha ha! This little segment about John Anthony is really funny, although on paper I can’t do justice to Pacino’s enunciation.) And for a measly twenty-five bucks a call, he’s gonna let the world’s losers listen in.’

It’s time for Brandon to hone his selling skills and us losers get to listen in on that. ‘This is John Anthony in the Big Apple with my big money picks,’ he intones monotonously and starts banging on about some college football game. In Walter’s office the pair listen to the CD. Walter turns it off. ‘I already hung up,’ he says. Back to square one for the B-man: ‘John Anthony here, ready to make all your betting dreams come true,’ he brags exuberantly. He returns to the office, where Walter again turns it off. ‘I think it’s all right,’ says Brandon. ‘Wrong,’ says Walter and tosses the disc out of the window. Ha ha! Walter wants to know Brandon’s sales pitch. ‘My sales pitch is I’m picking 80 per cent winners.’ Walter puts his head on his desk in disbelief. ‘Stats is not enough. I’m telling you, you need a voice… You’re selling certainty, in an uncertain world.’ Brandon works out in the gym. He then marches over to his Dictaphone device and has another crack. ‘Sit back and relax ‘cause it’s a Scud attack this weekend and I am shelling your bookmaker.’ Apparently pleased with this latest effort he races up to Walter’s office. ‘It’s a start,’ Walter concedes. Brandon was expecting more hyperbolic praise. ‘That’s not what you want, then you need to find somebody else to sell and let me just pick,’ he says. Walter is standing behind his chair and looks in a bad way. After further debate he almost keels over and staggers into his chair while Brandon rushes over concernedly. ‘Should I call somebody?’ he asks, as Walter gets some pills out of his pocket. ‘Not unless they got a spare heart,’ he replies. ‘It’s a small one,’ he wheezes. Brandon wonders if Walter wants some water but instead he reaches for the ciggies. A horrified Brandon helps him light one. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks. ‘Courage wants to laugh,’ Walter says enigmatically.

Brandon cycles around town, while we listen to American football commentators burbling. Brandon laughs as he cycles past an elephant being led along the middle of a (hopefully fairly quiet) road by a pair of men in dinner jackets and bow ties. Pedant alert! We earlier heard Walter say his daughter’s birthday was on Sunday, but the football being played is of the college variety, which is played on a Saturday. Let’s be charitable and say the party was brought forward a day. Nellie probably had a prior engagement on the Sunday. Back in his huge apartment, Brandon follows the football on his TV. I was wrong to be sarcastic early, the TV doesn’t just swivel around a bit, it’s huge and it does a complete 180 degree about-turn so you can actually watch it in different rooms of the flat. Brandon nods at the TV, so presumably his tips are faring well. ‘Brandon!’ he hears Walter shouting. Brandon looks outside the window and sees the trumpeting elephant entertaining the kids. Walter, who is standing on the street, wants to know how the tips are getting on. Brandon writes 0-9 on a bit of paper and shows it to Walter, looking pleased with himself. Walter swears. Oops, Brandon had the paper the wrong way up! He turns it the right way round and he’s 6-0. Walter dances a jig of delight.

At the party, Walter and Toni are strolling along together while Walter extols Brandon’s virtues. ‘This guy is a machine. All he does is work out and pick winners.’ This is only Brandon’s first week on the job and a cannier operator would surely want to see how he does in the longer term but Walter’s smitten, in every sense of the word. ‘Talk about fit, you should see him with his shirt off.’ Toni laughs, then suggests he should ‘enjoy (his) daughter’s birthday’, rather than sharing his homosexual fantasies about Brandon with her. Walter is relentless however, and apparently in the mood for a threesome. ‘You should check him out. I know you want to.’ Toni’s having no truck with such truly abnormal chat. ‘Get out of your head, it’s a bad neighbourhood,’ she warns.

In his office, Walter watches more college football action and studies a sheet of figures. We see that calls to Brandon’s hotline have increased by 82% ‘since previous summary report’. Walter grins maniacally.

In a posh restaurant, Walter, Brandon and Toni have dinner together. ‘I’m gonna have the bruketta,’ Brandon tells the waiter. Walter makes a face at Toni. ‘I think it’s pronounced ‘bruschetta’’ he informs Brandon. ‘They’re little pizzas, except they don’t have cheese in them.’ ‘Bruschetta,’ says Brandon. ‘Perfect,’ says Toni. ‘Who cares?’ says Walter, even though he brought it up in the first place. ‘Anyone who goes 20 for 24 college football, 12 for 14, professional, 175 calls on the 900 number, you can call bruschetta anything you want, son.’ Walter wonders if Brandon’s ever had a ‘thousand pound bottle of wine’. Finding that not to be the case, he shouts over to the steward. Toni tries to rein him in, pointing out that Brandon ‘hardly drinks’. Brandon confirms that he’s ‘good, man’ but Walter wants to celebrate. ‘Toni, come on. Just ‘cause he’s out with a couple of reformed drunks doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy himself.’ Toni denies she was a drunk and Brandon lightens the atmosphere by remarking that he’s never had ‘a twelve dollar bottle of water either’. ‘He thinks we’re fighting,’ says Walt. Brandon says that isn’t the case, gushes about how great everything is and thanks the pair of them. ‘Watch out Walter, he’s a fixer,’ says Toni.

We are now at the coffee and dessert stage of the meal and Toni asks Walter what the doctor told him. She could certainly have picked a more appropriate moment for such a conversation, like when it was just the two of them present for starters, although, in fairness, the way she says ‘come on’ at the end of her question suggests Walter may have been keeping mum. ‘I went yesterday and he seemed very concerned,’ says Walt. ‘Afterwards, he sat me down and looked into my eyes and he said: ‘Walter, who do you like in the Buffalo-Oakland game?’’ Brandon loves it (‘You tell him Buffalo?’) but Toni is pissed off. While she chides Walter and he protests, Brandon notices a beautiful blonde (Alexandria - Jaime King) sit down at a nearby table. She sizes him up.

Walter and Toni continue to squabble about his health. ‘I’m not raising a kid alone Walter.’ ‘In biblical times you’d just move in with my brother Morty anyway,’ he replies. She gives him a disapproving look but now he’s noticed Alexandria as well. She’s sitting with a pair of fat, bearded goons. Walter seeks Brandon’s opinion of her and our man admits that he’s a big fan. ‘She’s looking at you,’ says Walter. Yep, it’s time to wheel out the old, ‘I bet you can’t pull that beautiful girl’ trope. ‘Ten to one on a thousand, you can’t pick her up,’ is Walter’s suggestion. That means Brandon cops ten grand if he manages it, and loses a grand if he doesn’t. When it comes to wagering significant amounts of money on whether his employees can score with women, while his own wife looks on, Walter doesn’t mess around. ‘Why don’t we just go to Atlantic City and open a house account?’ says Toni, indignantly. ‘You know you can’t gamble, Walter, come on,’ she adds. In Toni-land, it seems betting heavily on picking up women is fine, unless you’re a former gambling addict. ‘Who’s gambling?’ says Walter obtusely. ‘I haven’t flipped a coin since the eighties. This is just a challenge.’ An amused Brandon confirms the odds and says he’s ‘gonna go introduce myself,’ while Toni shakes her head disbelievingly. Walter tells him to hold on a sec and heads over there himself. He interrupts the beardie brothers and informs Alexandria that she is ‘drop-dead gorgeous’. He goes on to claim that him and his ‘friends’ have been puzzling over something. ‘Your dates look like they haven’t missed a meal since Christ died. Seriously, you guys are eating like you got a date with the electric chair. What is going on?’ Finally, one of the goons gets up to clock Walter but he backs off and claims he was ‘just joking’. ‘I don’t want to get wounded with a fork.’ The goon is disgruntled but sits back down as Walter returns to his table. ‘What the hell was that?’ asks Toni, who is not best pleased, although I reckon most women would be in a cab home now and on the phone to a divorce lawyer. Years of marriage have clearly inured her to Walter’s predilection for behaving like a total moron. ‘I’ll buy them a bottle of champagne,’ he says soothingly. ‘You’ll pick up their cheque,’ she insists. Toni, don’t worry about placating a pair of goons, try to make clear to your mad-as-a-badger hubby that marching over to a table and insulting the people sitting there is not the way forward in the first place. Alexandria gets up from her table, gives Brandon and Co another look and heads off. ‘Your date’s going to the bathroom,’ Walter points out, a tad redundantly. ‘I don’t think that (Walter’s earlier outburst) helped me out too much, do you?’ says Brandon, patting him on the shoulder. ‘But thanks for the introduction.’ That doesn’t make much sense. Walter claims he was ‘raising the bar a little. John Anthony could close her’. Brandon heads off.

He runs into his prey on the stairs by some stained glass windows. ‘You … are beautiful,’ he informs her. She tries to get past him but he asks her to wait. ‘I want to get to know you.’ Alexandria is sceptical. ‘You just want to get in my pants.’ Brandon is momentarily stumped but rebounds with ‘No, no, no. I want to get in your mind and your heart and your soul, and I don’t see you wearing any pants in that equation. Do you?’ The best thing that can be said about that effort is that Brandon didn’t die of shame on the spot for uttering it but, incredibly, he is rewarded with a shy smile. Emboldened, he continues, ‘Let me ask you something’ and whispers into her ear. We cut to them kissing passionately in the back of cab and then having sex. What do you think Brandon whispered? I’m opting for: ‘I’ve got a Jacuzzi in my bed room. you know. Let’s go.’

At the office, Walter tells Brandon he’s ready to leave the 900 numbers behind. ‘We’re going to the second floor.’ He gets Brandon to put his ear to the door, and does the same thing himself. ‘That’s the sound of possibilities.’ As they head in, Walter puts Brandon in the picture. ‘This is where the sales people turn a ten dollar bettor into a thousand dollar bettor before he even knows he made the phone call.’ How philanthropic of them, I’ve no doubt the bettor’s families will be eternally grateful. The office is of the open-plan variety and resembles a trading floor of sorts, full of various chancers spouting sports jargon into their phones (‘I’m asking, do they use AstroTurf or AstroPlay?’). Walter greets Tammy (Carly Pope), introduces her to Brandon and collects the ‘phone sheet’ from her. ‘The losers who need us, the more they bet, the more we win,’ he tells Brandon. Walter doesn’t have the highest opinion of his client base. ‘We take ten per cent of a winning bet, anywhere from five hundred to five hundred thousand. That’s Southie (Kevin Chapman).’ He indicates a dark-haired man, who is busy imploring a client to ‘stop holding back and let’s make some serious money’. Another of the trader-types is advicing whoever he’s got on the phone to ‘bang a cheerleader’ but is also taking a keen interest in Walter and Brandon. An older gent tells Walter he has a client on the phone who is ‘a little miffed at our picks’. Walter ignores him and goes over to a guy sitting in a corner, barking stridently into his phone. ‘Reggie Hawks (Ralph Garman),’ says Walter, putting a paternal hand on his shoulder. ‘Best salesman ever.’ As if on cue, Reggie snaps: ‘I don’t have time for this kind of s***, Jimmy. I know you’re a loser. ‘Cause if you’re such a big winner, you wouldn’t have to pay cash to call me today.’ If it’s the carrot or the stick, Reggie tends to go with the latter.

Having reached the end of the trading floor, Obi-Wan and Luke enter a smart office, which, just like the apartment, is conveniently vacant, and at Brandon’s disposal. I can’t see the rest of the workforce having any problem at all with this neophyte getting his own office within weeks of joining the company. Walter wants to know if Brandon approves. ‘What’s not to like?’ enthuses the tipster supreme. The chap who was closely scrutinising the pair a minute ago barges into the office with some betting news for Walter. ‘Miami-New York point spread just went up to ten.’ Nothing if not tactile, Walter grabs himself some shoulder. ‘What do you think?’ he asks. ‘I think Miami is a lock. I’m gonna keep it on my sheet, are you kidding me?’ Walter does the honours, ‘This is Jerry (Jeremy Piven), my top handicapper. Came to me straight out of grad school.’ Jerry looks 30-ish, what’s a top handicapper got to do to get his own office around here? Brandon eases into his luxuriant chair. ‘Whoa,’ says Jerry. ‘Phone boy makes good. It’s a big jump from 900 numbers. (Ridiculously, as Jerry gives him a bit of friendly grief, Brandon puts on a pair of sunglasses, even though the blinds are down in his office.) Make sure you don’t get a nosebleed up here. He looks like a bleeder.’ If by bleeder, he means the sort of prat who puts his shades on midway through an indoor conversation, then I can only concur. ‘I’m just kidding,’ Jerry continues, deciding to take the high road. ‘Nice meeting you man, I got to get back to work.’ Brandon, apparently eager to piss off his new co-workers, calls out, ‘Say, by the way, tonight’s game? New York wins that outright.’ ‘Really?’ says Jerry, resisting the urge to rip off B’s shades and ram them down his throat. ‘They always play the fish tough and tonight it’s foregone’ the sunglassed sultan smugly summarises. Jerry’s not backing down. ‘I wish I had a pen, because I would absolutely never write that down.’ Not a great comeback, Jer. ‘You know, college is right for you,’ he adds. Brandon laughs. ‘You have to work your way up to pro ball around here,’ Jerry continues, again keeping it civil. ‘(To Walter) Rookie’s got balls. I almost like it, but I don’t. (To Brandon) Good luck.’ Brandon sits in his chair, laughing hyena-style, looking like an utter twit. ‘I get that all day,’ says Walter, as if we’ve just witnessed a fantastic comedy routine rather than generic office banter, and starts pacing around. ‘I got three guys who can pick games. I got twenty who could sell. I never had one who could do both.’ Really? Brandon’s unique in the sports betting sphere? ‘You mean me?’ says the Chosen One, as surprised as the audience. No, Walter means John Anthony. But John Anthony doesn’t exist, Brandon complains. He’s pretty dense sometimes. ‘I’m standing in his office and you’re sitting in his chair,’ says Walter. ‘So you want me to sell?’ Brandon asks. Walter now explains why he values Brandon’s multi-faceted skill set so highly. ‘Big bettors don’t want to talk to middlemen. They wanna talk to the guy giving them the picks. What’s the matter, you got a problem with selling?’ Brandon says he’s OK with it, and Walter decides to enlighten him on ‘a few choice phrases’ which will make the punters feel better about risking their hard-earned on Brandon’s selections: ‘I don’t want your money, I want your bookies f*****g money.’ He makes Brandon repeat it and pronounces his second attempt ‘not bad’. However, the fact Brandon left out the obscenity has not escaped him. ‘What happened to ‘f***’?’ Brandon’s not big on swearing. ‘It’s not a religious thing. I just don’t use it.’ ‘It was all right for Chaucer, six hundred years ago,’ Walter protests. Not really a convincing argument, wasn’t it de rigueur to lob suspected witches in the river six hundred years ago as well? Walter opens the door of the office. ‘I don’t want to embarrass you but I gotta do this.’ ‘I got someone here who has a problem saying ‘f***,’ he yells out. ‘F*** you!’ they all shout back. Brandon laughs like a simpleton.

There’s simply no escaping these two jokers, we now join them out on the busy streets of New York. I wonder what topics of earth-shattering import they are discussing? Brandon: ‘Look at that, a lot of brunettes.’ Walter: ‘They’re everywhere.’ I can imagine Bush and Cheney indulging in that kind of highbrow chat. Brandon wants to know where they’re off to. ‘We’re gonna continue your education.’

They knock on a door and a woman answers. ‘Is this the meeting?’ asks Walter. They’ve come to the right place. We skip forward to find Brandon sitting down and listening to some bloke relating his failings to the group. It’s a gamblers anonymous meeting. ‘You’d think with two mortgages out, the repo guy staking out my car, my job on the line and my wife threatening to leave that I’d stop, instead of staying in the chase, doubling down.’ ‘It’s a disease Leon,’ says the woman who let Scooby and Scrappy Doo in a minute ago. A few other members of the group offer sympathetic words before Leon sits down, to a round of applause.

Without waiting for an invitation, Walter gets up, stubs out his cigarette and announces, ‘My name is Walter and I’m new to this group.’ Everyone sweetly says hello. They’re always so friendly and supportive, these addict types. I’m far from a compulsive gambler but I’m sorely tempted to pop down to a meeting regardless. Walter embarks on a long, grandstanding speech. He’s been coming to ‘these meetings’ for 18 years and this is his ‘936th consecutive meeting’. The kindly gambling nuts predictably lavish him with praise. Walter hasn’t had a bet in all that time and relates to Leon’s tale. He informs Leon that ‘gambling is not your problem’. Leon wants to know more. ‘I don’t know how to say this without sounding a little rude, but you’re a lemon, Leon. Like a bad car, there is something inherently defective in you.’ He goes on to claim everyone else in the room, himself included, suffers from this defect. ‘Most gamblers, when they go to gamble, they go to win. When we go to gamble, we go to lose, subconsciously. Me, I never feel better or more alive than when they’re raking the chips away, not bringing them in and everybody here knows what I’m talking about. Even when we win, it’s just a matter of time before we give it all back.’ Blah, blah, blah, when ‘we’ lose big time, we realise we’re still alive, and ‘we f*** s*** up all the time on purpose’, in order to remind ourselves that we’re alive, is the gist of the rest of Walter’s rant. He eventually sits down, to stony silence. Brandon starts clapping and a few of the ‘lemons’, Leon included, join in. However, a youngish guy with sideburns brings a halt to the back-slapping by picking this opportune moment to realise ‘You’re the guy I see on TV every weekend selling betting picks’. What on earth is a gambling addict watching programmes like that for, is he trying to test his own resolve? I doubt many alcoholics regularly set their videos for ‘Floyd on Wine’. ‘So what?’ says Walter, unable to see why his presence here may not be welcome. He’s got another fan though. ‘This guy peddles a tout service on TV,’ a balding man with a goatee informs the gathering. Walter is characteristically unapologetic. ‘You read the charter buddy? We all left our jobs at the door…What, you gonna throw an ex-alcoholic bartender out of an AA meeting?…That’s bogus, man.’ You’d have to be a pretty masochistic ex-alcoholic to take a job as a bartender, that’s for sure. The reformed gamblers are not swayed. ‘Didn’t you come in with this jerk?’ sideburns asks Brandon. Walter realises it’s time to leave but tries to give his card to baldy on the way out. ‘We’re topping 80 per cent this season,’ he remarks. You have to admire his chutzpah. Brandon leads him away as Walter shouts out ‘You never know when you’re going to get a relapse.’ The angry mob hurl abuse at him.

Out on the street, Brandon asks ‘what the f***’ Walter was up to. ‘What did you say?’ ‘That was b******t.’ Walter is thrilled that his amoral behaviour has forced Brandon to resort to profanity. ‘That’s great man! I mean, it was all worth it, just from that one word…Man, I’m proud of you.’ Keep swearing B-Lang and it’ll be plain sailing for you when Walt fills out his employee evaluation report.

Coming next ...

2007-11-12T05:20:00.000-08:00

Two For The Money

Inside Man (part three)

2007-10-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

Back inside the police van, Darius is smoking, and wearily wondering: ‘How dumb do these morons have to be to think they’re gonna get a plane?’ Keith has become a great champion of Dalton’s and points out that he is ‘no moron’ but Darius is thinking on a more macro level. ‘I don’t just mean him. Any hostage taker. Those ragheads at the Munich Olympics. Who the f*** ever got a plane?’ These un-PC ramblings seem to give Keith an idea and he picks up the phone. ‘He wants a plane. I’m gonna give him a plane.’ Mitch is bewildered but Keith’s reasoning is sound. ‘This whole time, we’re trying to stall him, right? Wrong. They’re the ones that are stalling. The b******t questions, the Albanian thing … He wants to give us more time. He makes demands. He gives us deadlines. We stall. Then he gives us more time. I don’t think he’s in a rush.’ Mitch remains flummoxed.

Dalton answers the phone and Keith tells me him the plane is ready to go. But before they can get down to the brass tacks of in-flight entertainment and meat-free meals for any vegetarian passengers, Keith’s gonna ‘need to come in there and make sure the hostages are okay’. Dalton says Keith can have a gander at them when they ‘get on the bus’ but that’s not good enough: ‘I just need to make sure you’re not leaving any bodies behind’. Dalton thinks it over, then agrees to meet him at the front door. Mitch thinks Keith is ‘crazy to go in there’.

Keith arrives and is frisked down. You wouldn’t have thought a bank populated by gun-toting potential psychopaths would get a huge number of voluntary visitors but this place is busier than Clapham Junction at rush hour. Dalton, ever the gracious host, walks Keith around the premises, though he’ll definitely compromise his future as a tour guide if he insists on continually pointing a gun at the visitors. He goes back into credit by offering Keith some gum but our hero is not a man to waste time masticating when there are hostages to inspect. Dalton shows him into one of the rooms where the captives are sitting on the floor, and we hear a woman crying, a dubious touch considering they’ve been there for hours and even the most tremulous of the hostages might have been expected to be showing a modicum of stoicism by now. On the other hand, Keith’s tie is pretty shocking so maybe that has set her off. Dalton shows Keith the other hostage-filled rooms. More muffled crying. This is all well and good but the bank is very dark, what with it now being night time, and it’s not like Dalton is showing Keith every nook and cranny. If he was going to ‘leave a body behind’ he could just bung it in a cupboard or something. Anyway, they come across Brian, not playing violent computer games for once, and Keith asks for his release. Dalton declines. Keith wants to know if he’s seen the lot, hostage-wise. ‘There are some who misbehaved.’ They go into yet another room where these trouble-making hostages have been gagged. Upon Keith’s arrival they all start whimpering in truly ludicrous fashion. Keith promises he will ‘get you all out of here’.

‘Tour is over’ Dalton announces, which Keith takes to mean that it’s time for a little Q&A. ‘What were you planning on doing if you actually got the plane and the pilots, huh?’ ‘Excuse me?’ ‘You don’t want a plane. You never did … You saw ‘Dog Day Afternoon’. You’re stalling. Why? I don’t know. What’s the matter? You can’t get into the safe?’ ‘Perhaps.’ If Keith had stopped after ‘You’re stalling,’ he might have given Dalton a moment of worry, but instead he blunders on, admitting he’s still, essentially, pissing in the wind, and asking daft questions which Dalton can answer enigmatically. Even worse, he then opts for the old ‘there’s two ways out of this,’ standby. ‘The easy way, we walk out the front door together, or the hard boys cut the power, hit you with the tear gas, and come in strong through the glass. It’s your choice. You don’t want that. I don’t want that.’ Again with the ‘we want the same thing’ rubbish! Yes, after all the trouble he’s gone to, Dalton ‘wants to’ throw his hands up, forget any thoughts of improving his financial situation, and peaceably submit to a few years in prison. Keith presses on: ‘They’d like to do it tonight. You got night vision? You got gas masks?’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’m this close to ordering it.’ Unfortunately, as usual, Dalton is miles ahead of the game. ‘First, you don’t order an assault when no hostages have been killed and there’s no immediate threat. Second, if it ends that way, whatever happens, you don’t get to be the hero. You want to b******t me, try harder. Let’s go.’ Keith briefly ponders a riposte but realises he’s been taken to the cleaners yet again and equably gives his assent.

However, en route to the door, he tries another tack: ‘I tell you what. My ass is covered, sport. But I would not get too comfortable in here if I were you.’ Dalton is unruffled. ‘No? I got the cable guy coming on Wednesday.’ Keith laughs. ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ Keith quickly switches into car salesman mode, ‘Can I get you to do that today?’ but is met with silence. However, Dalton is surprisingly keen to continue the discussion and asks if Keith has ‘any other proposals?’ Even more inexplicably, Keith takes that as his cue to start moaning about his personal life. ‘Oh, please. Do not say ‘proposals’. My girlfriend, she wants a proposal from me.’ ‘You think you’re too young to get married?’ ‘No, I’m not too young. Too broke. Maybe I should rob a bank.’ Incredibly, Dalton wants to know more. I understand that he’s playing for time but feigning interest in the love life of this buffoon is well beyond the call of duty. ‘You love each other?’ ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’ ‘Then money shouldn’t really matter.’ ‘Thank you, bank robber.’ Exactly Keith! Dalton may be quick to hand out the old chewing gum (and he’s great with kids!) but he’s putting dozens of people through a terrifying, emotionally-scarring experience, solely to enrich himself. Yet he still has the chutzpah to claim money shouldn’t ‘really’ matter when it comes to affairs of the heart. And he carries on! ‘I’m just saying money can’t buy love.’ Keith is enormously grateful for the advice and is eager to hear more. ‘Why don’t we go across the street to the Killarney Rose, huh? Forget about this dangerous hostage situation. I’ll buy you a beer. My treat.’ Dalton doesn’t fancy it. ‘I’m trying to stay away from bars, if you know what I mean.’ That’s the lamest pun I’ve ever heard. It has to be said that this new loquacious Dalton is a bit of a prat. Keith agrees, offers his hand and, when Dalton takes it, he attacks. The pair roll down the stairs locked in combat but Keith STILL won’t quit with the annoying questions. ‘Cellblock or the graveyard?’ he enquires as they grapple. ‘Prison whites or a toe tag? Make up your mind. Tick tock, tick tock.’ Dalton keeps his masked face away from Keith’s prying hands and Steve or Steve-O arrives gun in hand to end their combat. ‘You just crossed the f*****g line,’ Dalton informs Keith, thrusting his gun towards him. ‘Buses, Kojak, parked outside. You think I’m bluffing? You roll the dice and see what happens.’ Keith takes his leave, probably wondering what bluff Dalton was referring to, considering he didn’t actually make any specific threat.

Outside, Mitch hustles up to Keith, eager for details. Keith has ‘got him right where I want him’. ‘Yeah? Where’s that?’ ‘Right behind me with my pants around my ankles but it’s a start.’ How lovely. Mitch has been on subsistence rations as far as getting good lines goes since the start of the film but his pickings have got really slim of late. All he does nowadays is squawk inane questions and murmur clichés. To whit, he mutters ‘Jesus Christ’ at this latest development and the pair march off.

Inside the room of the bank where Dalton’s Dynamos have dug a big hole , Steve or Steve-O articulately expresses his mounting disquiet at the way Dalton is conducting operations: ‘What the f*** man?’ Dalton wants to know ‘how long’ something is going to take. The Steve or Steve-O who isn’t haranguing Dalton (‘He got the drop on you. What if he saw your face? You know, you’re letting this cop get too f*****g close.’) says it will take ‘two, maybe three hours’.

Keith is inside the van giving Darius chapter and verse. ‘I gave him every excuse to blow my brains out. He doesn’t bite. Why? He ain’t the type.’ After briefly recapping the events of the day, Keith offers this analysis: ‘He’s up to something but it ain’t violence.’ Brilliant. (‘Keith, Keith. Some guy has broken into a bank and taken everybody inside hostage. What do you think?’ ‘Hmmmm. He’s up to something.’) Dalton checks in on the blower and tells Keith to use the camera on the truck to ‘give (him) a close-up on the second-floor window’. Rourke does the honours. Dalton waves to the camera then guns down a hostage with a sheet over his or her head. How ironic, Keith had just been banging on about how Dalton wasn’t the type for violence! I don’t think I’ve ever spotted a plot twist in my entire life but even I didn’t believe for a second that that was a real hostage. Nonetheless, Keith and Mitch are appalled and the former heads for the bank, via quite a memorable tracking shot which shows just the top half of his body moving along determinedly while chaos unravels behind him.

Dalton has made it downstairs in time to be calmly waiting for Keith at the door of the bank. Keith is not quite as relaxed: ‘What are you doing? What the f*** are you doing?’ ‘You mean beyond the obvious?’ ‘That’s what I mean. Come on, this ain’t no bank robbery (this ain’t no disco!’ - Talking Heads).’ Dalton is looking for a scapegoat. ‘This is your fault. I told you to get the buses.’ ‘F*** you! I didn’t kill anybody.’ Previously the pair have been yelling through the door at each other but Dalton now pops his head out. ‘I got 50 more people in here. You f*** with me again, I’ll give you two of the longest days of your life.’ Keith’s not looking to make trouble. ‘Just tell me what it is you really want and I’ll get it for you.’ ‘I’ve told you. Two buses, a plane,’ says Dalton in bored tones. ‘And box seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium,’ jokes Keith, who has quickly recovered his equilibrium after watching someone get shot in cold blood on his watch. ‘Don’t b******t a b********er,’ he adds. ‘You planned every inch of this thing right from the start. You got everybody marching to your beat, including me, and I’m through buying it.’ Dalton is impressed. ‘You’re too damn smart to be a cop,’ he remarks. ‘Now get the f*** out of here.’ A creature of habit, he pulls out his gun to ensure speedy obedience. Keith embarks on a dangerous, and pretty pointless, game of ‘Call my Bluff’: ‘What? You going to shoot me? Do it. S***, you got nothing to lose. I damn sure ain’t got nothing to lose, so shoot me. Do it. Shoot me.’ ‘F*** you. Tell them to send someone sane over here.’ Dalton heads back inside.

Darius is on the phone, informing someone ‘we got a big problem’.

‘Hey, Detective, this ain’t your day,’ a random cop informs Keith. Cheers mate! Captain Coughlin has turned up and Keith heads over in penitent mood. ‘Look, I know you put your trust in me and I just …’ ‘Well, you’re a good cop. Frazier, I need more like you. But if you’re going down on this one, I can’t go with you.’ Keith starts trying to explain but Cap doesn’t want to hear it. ‘I go to bed, everything’s hunky-dory. I get a call at 3:15 and there’s what? A dead hostage.’ It’s a strange mind that considers it hunky-dory for a gang of armed robbers to be holding 50-odd people hostage, but we should probably have guessed old Cap wasn’t playing with a full deck when he classed Keith ‘I don’t know a digital transmitter from my elbow’ Frazier as a ‘good cop’. Keith is adamant he can ‘end this’ but it’s too late. ‘I got to answer to the Chief of D’s,’ Cap points out. ‘Darius is calling the shots on this. That’s it.’ Darius? John ‘call a raghead a raghead’ Darius? Cap really has lost his marbles. Keith nods imperceptibly, Cap wanders off. Keith goes over to Mitch, who asks: ‘What’d he say?’ ‘That’s it,’ Keith replies dejectedly. ‘S**t,’ says Mitch in annoyance, and walks off! I promise I won’t mention this again but I don’t think Mitch has had a line with more than three words in it for about half an hour.

Inside the van, Darius, Coughlin and some cops are planning to assault the bank. I doubt Dalton and the Steves are quaking in their boots at the prospect. Darius has a schematic of the building and doesn’t like what he sees. There’s only one entrance and ‘then we got to make it up the stairs blind. Once we get up there, we’re right out in the open. They have the advantage of cover, they can pick us off like sitting ducks. (While he waxes pessimistic we see footage of this putative attack playing out.) Then if we make it across the floor and down the stairs, we still can’t tell the homies (?) from the good guys until they shoot at us’. Darius seems to have captured the consensus because another cop chimes in: ‘Even if it isn’t rigged with explosives, it’s still a f*****g nightmare.’ We cut to more shots of the would-be attack: hostages screaming, gunplay, one of the ‘homies’ is shot. We cut back to the van, where a moustachioed gent points out, ‘And let’s not forget the possibility of hostages being killed.’ We see one of the robbers being shot as he tries to use a hostage as a human shield. Darius weighs in again: ‘Well, our best hope is to separate them from the hostages. If we can get two or three upstairs and take them out?’ ‘Kill them,’ says Coughlin. Footage of that scenario being played out. One of the plotters (possibly Coughlin again) plays devil’s advocate: ‘What if there’s more than four?’ Back to Darius: ‘That’s what’s so nuts about it. Anybody in a painter’s suit could be a perp.’ A cop in a bandana has an idea, ‘Maybe we should dress our guys up like a bunch of painters’. Come off it mate, this is a serious business, not some Whitehall farce! No one shouts him down though, and earlier random cop adds: ‘And we should use rubber bullets. Take head shots. Put their lights out.’ ‘This all sounds too complicated for me,’ says Coughlin reaching for the door and shouting, ‘Keith, Mitch, come out of the diner, you’re back on the team.’ Not really. Despite all the negatives, you know he’s going to order the attack anyway. In reality, the camera now switches position to show us that Ren and Stimpy have actually been sitting there the whole time, quietly listening and looking exceedingly grim. ‘Rubber bullets it is baby,’ says Coughlin. That’s easy for him to say, I highly doubt he’ll be putting his ample backside anywhere near the line of fire.

Sitting with Keith, Mitch gets his longest line for hours, but sadly it’s not good tidings. ‘If this goes down wrong they’re going to dump this whole mess in your lap, you know?’ I’m not sure that would be the case and Keith thinks otherwise too: ‘I’m making first grade.’ Mitch reverts to type: ‘What?’ ‘I’m making Detective First Grade. Things ain’t all they appear to be.’ Mitch is outraged as Keith explains how ‘the Mayor and our mystery guest’ can be thanked for his wholly undeserved promotion, which, by the way, I don’t remember being in any way definitively agreed. ‘Everybody’s getting theirs. I’m gonna get mine,’ is Keith’s justification. ‘I’ll be outside’. He leaves so Mitch closes his eyes, put his head back and amuses himself thinking of ways to murder Keith. Either that or he takes his trite remarks quota into three figures for the film by musing ‘What a day, what a day.’

Miles out of the loop and with time on his hands, Keith chats to a sympathetic Collins outside. Keith wants to know more about the time Collins was menaced by a 12-year-old with a gun. ‘Last year, up in the 33rd,’ says Collins. ‘I was breaking up a fight about a half a block from the high school. This one little spic is getting his clock cleaned by another one.’ Right-on Keith tells him to ‘tone down the colour commentary,’ although he’s been letting Darius get away with similar all day. Collins looks pissed off but continues, ‘So I bust up the fight, I turn around and this kid is pointing a .22 at my chest.’ ‘Which kid was this?’ asks Keith. ‘Another kid, an … African-American.’ ‘An African-American, right?’ ‘Came out of nowhere. I didn’t see him.’ The upshot is that Collins got ‘shot in the f*****g chest’. Riled, he continues, ‘So you’ll pardon my euphemisms Detective, but I would rather wind up an old bigot than a handsome young corpse. (Keith finds this hilarious.) Now, no offence Detective, but I’m just trying to keep them away from us (?). Now, what do you say we just get these people safely out of the bank?’ ‘I hear that.’ ‘And I’ll try and watch what I say in the future. You never know who’s listening.’ Keith looks overly serious. Well, I think we all learnt something from that conversation … namely that if film-makers deleted pointless, extraneous scenes, we’d all be rewarded with leaner, better movies. Unfortunately, they all want their ‘pictures’ to clock in at around two hours, so we are subjected to Collins’s homespun wisdom.

That said, Collins’s odd remark about how ‘you never know who’s listening’ has given Keith an idea. We find him again on his own inside the van, trying to dismantle the suitcase-type thing scrawled with Dalton’s demands which old Vikram brought out earlier on. This is all perfectly believable. When bank robbers send out their instructions on unusual objects, it’s standard practice to just read the demands, then toss the object to one side, rather than examine it thoroughly in case there’s any evidence to be unearthed. Keith and Co don’t even seem to have brushed it for fingerprints. Nor have they even tried to open it, which proves to be an error of judgement because, when Keith does so, he uncovers an easily findable listening device. He throws it down in annoyance, as if this was a malign twist of fate rather than breathtaking incompetence.

‘Darius. Darius, don’t make a move!” Keith bawls into a radio. ‘It’s all f****d up!” Darius asks what he’s on about. ‘They heard everything we said in the M.C.C (ah, Mobile Command Centre! It would have been so much classier if I had called it that all this time, instead of simply ‘the van’). ‘What?’ says Darius, although Keith was speaking pretty clearly. ‘The drawer with the demands in it (and that’s what that thing was, this is a hugely informative 20 seconds). They heard everything we said … They bugged us!’ Mitch is running around in a panic by the way. I love the incredulous tones Keith uses to relay this information, as if sticking a bug in some drawer is the most Machiavellian feat of criminal cunning he’s ever encountered. Darius, idiotic to the last, rebuts this by saying, ‘No, no, no. I’m going in’ and we see Dalton sitting at a desk, calmly listening in. ‘Shit,’ he says, though even that’s strange, considering he presumably heard them planning this assault half an hour or so ago.

We briefly see Stevie, mask off (yes, it’s Miss ‘I violated Section 34 double-D?’ from earlier - everything is falling neatly into place) before she puts it back on and her and Dalton start lobbing smoke canisters around. ‘Get everyone together,’ he instructs so she bawls ‘Steve! Steve-O!’ while chucking a couple more gas canisters down a corridor. The boys duly come running. ‘They’re coming in,’ Dalton informs them. ‘Everybody good?’ They are indeed. They head off to get the hostages, who are herded out, screaming as usual. ‘Everybody up the f*****g stairs,’ shouts Dalton and the hostages charge. We move to a vantage point outside the bank and see an explosion within, before the doors swing open and, after a lengthy pause, the hostages begin to emerge, shouting ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!’ No prizes for guessing how the police react. They start gunning them down! Yes, they’re only using rubber bullets and yes, they do know the robbers are also wearing painter’s gear, and yes, the emergence of the hostages onto the street is an unexpected development, to say the least, but wouldn’t you wait until you saw a weapon before starting to shoot people indiscriminately? Even more unbelievably, it’s Darius who sees sense and orders a cease fire, although he has to shout it about eight times before anyone obeys, though they must all be able to clearly hear him through their earpieces. I’ll say it once more, then forever hold my peace. This police unit as a whole, from the top dogs like Coughlin, Keith and Darius, to the lower-downs who delivered the pizzas, are the most inept ever portrayed on film (Drebbin and the Naked Gun gang not excluded). I think Collins is the only cop whose dignity remains intact.

The hostages raise their hands and pull their masks off while the police wade in and throw them to the floor. They slap on the handcuffs while Keith, Mitch and Darius look on. ‘Don’t take any chances,’ Darius tells his men. We see a distraught Nancy, who protests: ‘It wasn’t me! I’m not a criminal!’ and we also see Stevie and, I think, Steve and Steve-O, who have melded in with the hostages.

After further shouting, the ‘E.S.U. team’ lead the charge into the bank. It’s deserted, so Keith and Mitch head in behind them. The team go into the store room but find it ‘clear!’. Dalton has presumably ensconced himself in the hole underground. Keith approaches the team leader and asks about the dead hostage but there’s no sign of him or her. ‘If it ain’t here, you must’ve missed something,’ Darius insists but the team boss disagrees. ‘Maybe, but I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones moving around down here. Check this out (he walks towards the safe). They forgot to rob the joint.’ ‘Holy s**t,’ says laconic Mitch but Keith is far more interested in the fact his poorly-executed brinkmanship may not have cost any lives after all. ‘We’re still looking,’ TL continues, ‘but there are no bad guys, no booby traps, no tunnels (?), no damage.’ No tunnels, but a roomy underground den where the man behind all this is lying low until the dust settles. Would they really not have found him at some point? What about that laser-imaging thing where human bodies show up as red, wouldn’t that lead them to Dalton in a trice? ‘And nothing missing,’ points out Mitch, graciously given a three-word line by the screenplay writers. Keith is hacked off. ‘Great, great, great. We’ll put out a city-wide description for David f*****g Copperfield then huh?’ He marches aggressively over to the TL as he says this, begging to be laid out, but TL heroically restrains himself. ‘I’m not trying to tell you your jobs, Detectives, but unless they swam out through the toilets, whoever did this is upstairs sucking pavement.’ Keith realises he’s been a dick and pats TL on the back. ‘All right, good job.’ TL leaves but Darius spots the bags full of mobile phones. Keith empties them out, but before he can find the one with the best camera phone and start taking photos of Darius gurning around in the safe they are called away again. As he leaves, Keith barks ‘Collins (what’s he doing in there?). Grab a uniform (!), make a quick count of that money in there, all right?’ That’s a bank safe. A busy bank in the one of the busiest cities in the world. I don’t think any count of the money in there is going to be too ‘quick’, though Collins has only got himself to blame for needlessly hanging around. ‘Don’t let anybody get tempted, including you!’ is Keith’s parting shot. Nice to be trusted by your superiors.

Keith goes up to a couple of cops and asks what they’ve found. ‘You’re going to love this one. Toy guns.’ Keith is thrown one to examine. ‘Fake guns. You got to be kidding me.’ The only way Keith would know a replica gun from the real kind would be if he took aim at his own head, pulled the trigger and nothing happened, so he quickly tosses it to Darius, who has entered with Mitch. ‘As if it wasn’t weird enough already,’ observes Mitch, who continues to descend into self-parody. Over his radio, Darius is called to the ‘ladies room’. How embarrassing!

Keith and Mitch accompany him and they are handed a blood stained sheet and some sort of remote device. ‘We can stop looking for that body,’ says Darius, although him, Keith and Mitch haven’t really been looking for anything so much as standing around and waiting for others to do the dirty work. Mitch grins inanely at the wackiness of it all while Keith spells it all out. ‘Fake guns. Fake execution. Nobody goes home till we get everybody’s story.’ ‘But detective, the hostages all seemed a bit stressed out so we’ve let them go home,’ says one of the cops. ‘You didn’t need their names or anything did you?’ Of course not. Keith’s latest statement of the blindingly obvious is met with silence, and here comes yet another messenger. ‘Cap, we got something else in the storage room.’ I’m guessing it’s not a dishevelled, slightly-pissed off looking Dalton. Yet again, Keith and Mitch horn in on Darius’s action and they are shown …

… some bin bags on the floor of the storage room, filled with people’s clothes. Keith literally looks for a second, then asks where the men’s room is and races off, without even bothering to pass comment on this latest find.

It’s not been an all-time great day for the hostages, the innocent ones at least, who are still lying around on the road. A coach pulls up to take them to the police station and they are stood up and searched first. ‘Female hostages to be searched by female officers only,’ shouts a disembodied voice through a megaphone, which the subtitles claim is the ubiquitous Collins. He counted that loot pretty damn fast and, once more, what would he be doing calling the shots anyway? I think the subtitles may be in error. The hostages are photographed and asked for their names. It’s a bit of a melee and hard to tell what’s what but I believe Stevie claims her name is ‘Valerie Keepsake’. Peter Hammond and Chaim both make appearances, Nancy rails at some unfortunate cop: ‘f*****g c********r’, Steve (or Steve-O) keeps himself to himself and one of the bank security guards freaks out. ‘Get him on the bus,’ insists subtitled ‘Collins’. We pan down the bus, so we can examine battered, bruised and fatigued-looking hostages. Cheer up guys, it’ll be something to tell the grandkids.

Coughlin walks over to a desk where Keith is looking dejected. ‘This thing is a mess. They thought this one out, soup to nuts.’ Coughlin: ‘So, lay it out for me.’ Keith obliges, ‘We photograph everybody that came out of the bank. We sit them down, we question them, we show them the photos. Most of them can’t point to anybody that’s guilty of anything. We ask them if they could recognise anybody who was not one of the bad guys. Even if we considered someone as a possible suspect, there’s one or two or three other people that would rule them out. It’s like the thing never happened.’ ‘What about prints?’ ‘Everywhere. So what? All it shows is that these people were there.’ ‘Alibis?’ ‘Just about everyone. Even if their alibi was weak, a hostage would identify them as being one of the good guys.’ I take alibi to mean an ‘I couldn’t have been there because I was here and these people saw me’, type defence so that last exchange is odd. We know they were all present at the bank and Keith had already established that everyone had been identified by someone else as a hostage. Personally, I’m surprised the solution to ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ didn’t get an airing at this point (I won’t spell it out explicitly in case any readers are halfway through the book as we speak). Back to Coughlin. ‘Piors?’ ‘We got one employee who had some juvie stuff. One customer had … (Keith pauses to cough. He’s certainly no Jack Bauer. He goes to the toilet, he clears his throat, and, a harsher critic than me might add, he fails to get the job done.) an out-of-state warrant for child support. Another one had a couple of priors, G.L.A. mostly. Again, same problem. Plus, he was a f*****g idiot.’ ‘Bank cameras?’ says Coughlin, who is blatantly going through the motions. ‘Useless. I’m telling you they thought of everything. Almost…We haven’t found that .357 or the perp that was holding it.’ ‘If you did, there’d be no prints on it anyway. (Pause) Bury it.’ Keith can’t believe what he’s hearing, and is, for once, briefly lost for words. ‘Captain, this thing stinks to high hell. I mean, somebody did something here.’ ‘You got no robbery. No suspects. Nobody’s breathing down my neck to come up with answers. I’m not gonna breathe down yours. Bury it.’ Keith remains stupefied, ‘I wasn’t expecting this.’ ‘I promise you, I’ll find you guys more cases to solve.’ And New York’s criminal fraternity say a hearty three cheers to that. Cap, you can find him all the cases you want, but don’t stake your hopes for promotion on his success rate. Keith looks at him suspiciously but acquiesces and sidles off. ‘Oh, here’s something that you probably didn’t expect,’ Cap calls out. ‘They found that missing Madrugada money.’ ‘No s***.’ ‘You want to know where it was?’ ‘In my bank account?’ ‘No.’ ‘My summer house in Sag Harbour?’ ‘No (chuckling).’ ‘My wallet?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then, no. I don’t want to know.’ Pretty drab scene. We laugh at Mitch for his straight-man routine but he’s sorely missed when absent.

Here he is now though, and he’s in classic mid-season form! ‘This is b******t man.’ Mitch has got a massive bee in his bonnet about the fact that they’re still working on a case about which no one else gives a hoot. He then starts a diatribe about Keith’s ‘accusers’. ‘I say we go after them all, Keith, Michael Corleone style. ‘Michael Corleone, do you renounce Satan?’ ‘Yes, I renounce him.’’ Mitch makes daft gun-shooting noises. Luckily, Keith is paying him as much attention as usual, namely none whatsoever, and is studying the safety deposit box records. ‘There’s no 392... According to these records, it doesn’t exist. (That) Pinstriped, mayonnaise, lying m********r.’ I love a musical reference so I can’t resist pointing out how well that line would have fitted into ‘Give Me Some Truth’ by John Lennon. Mitch, who a minute ago was preaching violent revolution, points out that Coughlin said they should ‘move on’ but Keith is up and on the march.

Inside the courthouse, Keith talks to ‘Judge Pasqua,’ thanks him and says he’ll ‘pick it up tomorrow’. How do I know it was ‘Judge Pasqua’? Because Madeleine is back, she’s mysteriously at the courthouse herself and she’s as grating as ever. She wants to know what ‘business (Keith has)’ with the judge. ‘Police business.’ She wonders why he isn’t burying the case as instructed, so he explains that he’s got ‘a job to do, Miss White’. ‘And since when is your job more important than your career? Or did you forget our arrangement?’ ‘We didn’t have any arrangement.’ Madeleine flicks on her condescension switch: ‘Let me tell you how this works. You …’ but Keith’s finally had it up to here. ‘No, let me tell you how this works. You press here to record and you press here to play. (Keith is showing her a cassette player.)’ It plays back the conversation Keith had when he met Madeleine and the Mayor in the car, except this time we get to hear what was said after Keith had denied involvement in the ever-tedious Madrugada business. Mayor, smarmy: ‘We’d like to be in your corner on that.’ Keith, self-righteous: ‘In exchange for what? I mean, what, do you want me to do something unethical? I mean, no disrespect to the both of youse, but I don’t need you to be in my corner, Mr Mayor. Look, I’m innocent.’ Madeleine, threatening: ‘Innocent or guilty, you’re still going down.’ Mayor, authoritative: ‘Give Miss White whatever she needs, or your career is over. Done. Kaput.’ Not very Mayor-like language your honour! Keith stops the tape but Madeleine fails to see what he has proved. ‘So? You gave me what I wanted. Your career is blossoming and all is right with the world.’ Keith is nosey though, and wants to know what ‘Case (was) hiding’. ‘You know, there’s a famous saying by the Baron de Rothschild. ‘When there’s blood on the streets, buy property.’ I think Mr Case really took that sentiment to heart. But he is no different to half the Fortune 500. Let it go, Detective. You’re a good cop. The city needs you.’ Keith walks off down a spiral staircase, unimpressed. As am I, if that’s how Madeleine justifies working for Case. His motto was more: ‘If there’s blood on the streets, make friends with the guys causing it to be spilt’. The Baron’s version is pithier, I admit.

After a pleasant, Madeleine-free period, here she is once again. For some reason Case is having his hair cut in a room out back beyond the gent’s toilets but Madeleine breezily strolls through anyway, claiming she ‘(has) an appointment’. They greet each other in congenial fashion and she sits down, while Case, immaculately coiffed, gets rid of ‘Vincent’. ‘Detective Frazier turned out to be quite sharp,’ Madeleine reports. ‘But I just fast-tracked his career a little and he’s under control.’ We see a shot of Keith being given a framed certificate and looking at it quizzically. Well he might, I hear you all say! Case wants to know ‘about the envelope’. ‘Well, the gang leader is going to hang on to it, as an insurance policy to keep you from seeking revenge. Clearly, he has a very low opinion of you (said with a fair amount of relish).’ Case wonders why. ‘In a nutshell, (because) you got rich doing business with the Nazis during the Holocaust.’ Case admits it. ‘It was 60 years ago. I was young and ambitious. I saw a short path to success and I took it. I sold my soul. And I’ve been trying to buy it back ever since. But you and this mystery man, you have an understanding?’ ‘I think so. And he managed to get out of there with that envelope. If someday he comes back to blackmail you, well, you’ll pay him. And you’ll get it back. So, I guess that’s it.’ ‘I suppose so.’ ‘B******.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘He didn’t go through all that just to stick your envelope under his mattress. They left money untouched, Arthur. He had to have walked out of there with something else. There had to have been something in that box that was worth more to him than your envelope. You don’t have to tell me (that’s big of her). There’s only one thing it could be anyway … Diamonds.’ ‘And then there’s the ring,’ Case adds. ‘Cartier ring. It belonged to the wife of a Parisian banker. Wealthy family of French Jews. And when the war came along, the ring and everything else they owned was confiscated and they were shipped off to concentration camps. None survived. We were friends, I could have helped them. But the Nazis paid too well.’ Sorry for just transcribing that long conversation verbatim, without much commentary, but it’s so expositional to the plot that I thought it was justified. Case wants to be assured that Madeleine won’t blab about all this ‘despite whatever you may think’. He passes a cheque over to her. She smirks and, for a moment, I thought she was going to walk off without her payment but, to be fair, she stays in character and takes it. ‘I’d love to tell you what a monster you are, but I have to help bin Laden’s nephew buy a co-op on Park Avenue (remember the guy she was talking to earlier?).’ Case laughs. ‘If that were true, you wouldn’t tell me.’ ‘We’re listing you as a reference,’ she says and walks off looking insufferably pleased with herself. Case sighs and tries to throw his cheque-book onto the counter but it falls back off and onto the ground. Re: Madeleine’s payment. She didn’t recover the envelope, nor did she recover the diamonds or the ring. AND, because of that failure, Case may be blackmailed at some point (we may know it’s unlikely Dalton would bother but Case doesn’t) and will have to part with another large wad of cash to avoid being exposed. As Seinfeld would say, ‘Good work Nancy Drew!’ And yet she receives her payment in full and Case also has to help her out with her latest nefarious project.

Back to Dalton, spouting that bilge from the start of the film, ‘the who, the where, etc, etc’. His ‘cell’ looks pretty luxurious. He’s even using his mobile for Pete’s sake. It looks like a room that was already there, not a hastily constructed cubby-hole. While he hear him burbling, Dalton examines the diamonds and the ring, which he has in a nice little pouch. Then we watch the Steves putting up walls and suchlike earlier on, so it looks like they’ve just walled off part of the storeroom. Although in that case, what was the hole for and wouldn’t any of the bank employees notice the wall had been moved in. Maybe not, if it wasn’t moved in by much, considering that they may not spend huge amounts of time in the storeroom. Anyway, we can conjecture on that at our leisure because it’s time to go, so Dalton turns off the lights and emerges out into the room from behind some boxes. Good job no one’s around while all this goes on eh? He covers the hole back up. In a car outside, Steve points out that Dalton is ‘going to smell like s**t’. Steve-O: ‘What do you expect after a week?’ Chaim is there! I wasn’t counting on that. ‘Why do you think I rolled down the window?’ he says. Stevie laughs. Dalton’s really not in much of a rush, can he be that certain no one ever goes into the storeroom? He puts on sunglasses, a New York Yankees cap and a ruck-sack. Hold your horses though, Scarlett and Rhett have turned up outside! This causes consternation amongst the criminal contingent and they give Dalton a buzz. ‘That cop Frazier and his partner are walking into the bank.’ I know you’re all thinking it but I’m going to say it anyway. Coincidence or what? At the precise moment Dalton decides to stroll out with his ill-gotten gains, a whole week since the robbery took place, Morecambe and Wise decide to put in an appearance at the bank. ‘Are they coming for me?’ Dalton wonders. ‘Can’t say. It’s just the two of them.’ Dalton rather tentatively begins to walk out but gradually picks up speed. It seems to be easier than you might surmise to stroll around in the nether regions of banks undetected. As Keith comes up the stairs Dalton bangs into him as he goes the other way but the pair merely exchange apologies and move along. Keith greets ‘Mr Hammond’, who wishes him and Mitch a ‘good morning’. Dalton exits. ‘Just like he planned,’ says Stevie, admiringly.

Back inside, Keith remains eager to get his mitts on the missing safety deposit box ‘392’, and has got a court order allowing him to do just that. Back outside, Dalton walks over to the car, looking justifiably pleased with himself. He hands Chaim the bag, shakes hands with Steve and exchanges a long kiss with Stevie, while Steve-O ‘thank(s) God’ for his safe return. ‘Where is it?’ asks Chaim. ‘I left it in there.’ ‘Why did you do that? You left the ring.’ ‘Trust me. I left it in good hands.’

Time for a voiceover from Dalton: ‘I’m no martyr. I did it for the money. But it’s not worth much if you can’t face yourself in the mirror. Respect is the ultimate currency (the crooks drive off while Hammond shows Bonnie and Clyde where the safety deposit boxes are). I was stealing from a man who traded his away for a few dollars. And then he tried to wash away his guilt. Drown it in a lifetime of good deeds and a sea of respectability. It almost worked, too. But inevitably, the further you run from your sins, the more exhausted you are when they catch up to you (what a load of old bollocks, and I still want to know how Dalton is so knowledgeable about Chase’s misdeeds from over half a century ago. Anyway, while he’s been rabbiting melodramatically, the boys have opened the box to find … a ring, a few chewing gum wrappers and a note). And they do. Certain. It will not fail.’ Keith examines the ring and is suitably impressed. ‘What do you think that’s worth?’ The film is clearly drawing to a conclusion but there’s still time for Mitch to drop one last clanger, as he laughingly remarks, ‘If you got to ask, man, you can’t afford it’. That just doesn’t make any sense. If he’s got to ask he’s … not a diamond appraiser, although the initial fault probably lies with Keith for asking in the first place. ‘Thank goodness my girlfriend ain’t here,’ says Keith, apparently of the opinion that she would demand he steal the ring and propose on the spot. He turns to the note, which simply says ‘Follow the ring.’ Mitch looks, altogether now … bewildered!

Sonny and Cher head to the opulent offices of Mr Arthur Case. Everybody’s least favourite carpetbagger politely asks after Keith’s health. ‘I am great. Nobody got killed at the bank. Everybody’s happy. My kind of day.’ Case pours himself a drink. ‘I was most impressed by the way you handled that business … Whenever I hear the term ‘New York’s finest’ you’re who I think of (Saints preserve us!). You keep the rest of us safe and make it look easy.’ Keith laughs, as do the watching audience. ‘What’s so amusing?’ Case wonders. ‘When you say ‘the rest of us’ Mr Case, I mean, you got to look around. ‘The rest of us’ is a category that you haven’t qualified for in a long time.’ Keith definitely carries a bit of class envy around with him. Listen to the diamond thief old chap, money can’t buy you happiness. ‘Touché, Detective. I won’t deny it. I’ve done well.’ Despite his good humour, Keith remains ‘very confused’ . ‘I got a case where armed robbers laid siege to your bank (a siege is surely when you surround a building or town, so if anyone was laying siege to the bank it was the police, but hey, let‘s not be pedantic when Case is about to twist in the wind).’ Mitch wants to confirm that it is, in fact, Chase’s bank. He’s the ‘Chairman of the Board of Directors’. Keith: ‘Then ita-zita-vene-gazoo (I’m not quite sure what unusual magicians Keith was exposed to as a kid). The robbers disappear. Poof. And they don’t take a nickel, right?’ Chase is now on the run, so he tries to play down the bank’s significance. ‘It’s a tiny part of our organisation.’ However, Keith is dogged in pursuit, ‘No robbers. No real victims. No loot missing. It’s got to be the first time in law-enforcement history.’ He turns to that renowned criminology scholar Mitch to confirm that this is indeed the case. Mitch has ‘never heard of it before’. Time to resort to profanity: ‘You got to ask yourself, ‘what the f*** happened?’ don’t you Mr Case?’ Case doesn’t like Keith’s tone. ‘Then give me a straight answer. It’s the founding bank of your empire. You built it. It’s your baby. Give me a straight answer. What do you think happened?’ Case insists he is clueless but Keith doesn’t buy it and posits his own theory. ‘I think you sent that woman in there to patch things up. Miss White, I think you paid her. What was she doing in there?’ Bravo Keith, although you’d think he might have wondered this earlier. Case finds the theory ‘absurd’ but Keith shuts him up by barking ‘three ninety-two’ across the desk. ‘Safe deposit box three ninety-two. What’s the story on that?’ Case pleads innocence yet again, Keith flat-out calls him a liar. ‘I looked at all the records. At first glance, everything looked fine, but there was one safe deposit box that had no records. I mean, going all the way back to 1948. So I started thinking. Who would have the answer to this riddle? Probably the man who forgot to mention that he built the bank in the first place in 1948. It doesn’t add up, Mr Case.’ Case gets up and tries to bring proceedings to a halt. ‘It’s something really bad, isn’t it?’ Keith speculates. ‘Mr Frazier, I have spent my whole life serving humanity,’ says Case. ‘You can ask anyone who knows me (the camera pans across a selection of awards and paraphernalia on a shelf. Case is with Maggie Thatcher in one photo, which doesn’t massively enhance his humanitarian credentials). They’ll vouch for me, and for the things that I’ve done.’ Keith plays his final ace, ‘You think they’ll vouch for you after I find out the truth about this ring? (He has it on his finger.) I don’t think so. (Long pause.) Oh, by the way, that thing you said about us being New York’s finest? I want you to know, we really appreciate that.’ ‘How gracious.’ Keith puts his hat on aggressively. ‘Let’s go. We’re gonna follow that ring.’ I didn’t realise this was all based on a Tolkien novel. Mitch hangs around for a bit to glare at Case hilariously.

Outside, Mitch demands to see Keith’s shoe. This is going to be some ass-kissing thing about how he kicked Chase all round New York isn’t it? Yes, I’m afraid so. ‘Cause I have never seen anybody put their foot that far up a guy’s ass.’ Keith absolutely loves it. ‘Oh man. You cut him an ass the length of the Lincoln Tunnel. We’re gonna need a traffic cop on that s***.’ Keith has never heard anything so hilarious in his life. Bid Mitch a fond farewell, that’s the last we’ll see of him. Appropriate scene to go out on, with two pals apparently clowning around but one unquestionably in the senior role. Let’s not be churlish though, Mitch has been one of the joys of the film, if at times unintentionally.

Keith bowls into some restaurant ‘looking for the mayor’. ‘May I have your hat, please?’ asks an officious type. ‘No, you cannot. Get your own.’ Ha, ha! I’d imagine one of the best things about being a policeman is that you can be gratuitously rude to officious types without fear of repercussion. Madeleine and some nerd are dining with the Mayor and she is informing him that ‘they’re looking to invest $4 billion over the next four years’. Keith crashes the party. ‘Sorry to interrupt you Mr Mayor, but there’s an old American saying, ‘When there’s blood on the streets, somebody’s got to go to jail.’’ I know it pertains to Madeleine’s remark from earlier but that’s still a pretty bizarre opening salvo. Keith shows the company the ring. The mayor tells ‘Edwin’ the nerd to sod off, in so many words. Madeleine thinks Keith is ‘looking for closure’. He’ll go along with that. ‘This is the number of the War Crimes Issues office in Washington, D.C.’ He hands it to Madeleine, who apparently doesn’t have a phone-book of her own. ‘How’d you like to be on the front page of the New York Times?’ she enquires. ‘That’d be great. Make sure they spell my name right, though.’ ‘You made copies?’ Of what? The ring? Bit of a puzzler this scene. Is Case going to get done for having the ring or is it simply going to be restored to its rightful owners? Then again, the family it belonged to all died and they may not have any descendents. Keith, as his wont, laughs uproariously while everyone else remains stony-faced. ‘Please. We got to keep the real criminals off the streets, Your Honour. All right, well, thanks for lunch.’ He ambles away, leaving Madeleine to face the music. ‘War crimes, huh?’ says the Mayor. ‘What have you got me into this time?’ She looks somewhat chastened at last.

Keith returns to his apartment after a fun day putting the wind up people. Sylvia’s brother is sleeping on the settee. Keith goes into another room and whispers ‘Mama?’ Sylvia is lying on the bed. ‘Did you bring Big Willie?’ she asks. ‘And the twins.’ They kiss. Keith wants to ‘get his gun off’ before they get down to business. She poses sexily in his hat and he laughs happily. Ever since the end of the hostage crisis, Keith has been having the time of his life. We see the certificate he was given earlier: ‘Certificate awarded to Keith Frazier. In recognition of your dedication, superior achievement and outstanding service to the New York City Police Department and to the city of New York as witnessed by your designation as DETECTIVE FIRST GRADE (their caps)’. The certificate is dated August 12 2005 - my birthday! An auspicious date all round. Keith puts his gun, badge and phone away. What’s this in his pocket? It’s a sparkler! His mind leaps back to when he crashed into Dalton in the bank. That’s right, Keith. You crashed into your nemesis and let him stroll off into the sunset. We hear an earlier conversation. Keith: ‘Why don’t you just walk out the door?’ Dalton: ‘I will. I’m gonna walk out of that door when I’m good and ready.’ A look of dawning comprehension creeps across Keith’s face. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he murmurs. Then he laughs and admires the diamond. ‘Come on honey. The handcuffs are getting cold (what, have they been in the oven?)’ Sylvia says enticingly. Keith really is a jammy bastard.

Inside Man (part two)

2007-10-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

Some of the hostages are sitting quietly together on the floor of a room. However, a youngish man has had enough of his painter’s apparel and rips off his mask. ‘They want to shoot me for taking off my mask, they can go ahead’. The other hostages don’t agree with this unilateral act of rebellion and a loud argument ensues. Dalton bustles in, to the traditional accompaniment of screeching from the female hostages, and drags this rogue element off by his legs .The young turk quickly ditches the bravado and promises to fall into line, meanwhile trying to grab onto things as he is pulled along. Dalton lifts him up and punches him in the face.

Interview room. Holmes and Watson are trying to crack the Rabbi. They make him produce his hearing aids when he claims he couldn’t hear much of what the robbers were saying, then they try calling him ‘Steve’ to see if he responds and finally they ask how much ‘they’ are going to pay the Rabbi. Despite these fiendish stratagems, no confession is forthcoming.

Bugged pizza delivery! The boys in blue have even thrown in a few bottles of pop to wash them down with. Some policemen dump the goods outside and Dalton emerges (‘If he gives us a tip, I’m keeping it’). Keith has tagged along and gets the men to shut up when, so cool a moment ago, they yet again start emitting panicked yells the moment someone comes out of the bank (‘Put that gun down! Check that weapon!’). Keith greets Dalton with a civil ‘How you doing?’ and introduces himself. ‘I hope the pizzas are okay, They might be a little cold.’ Why on earth might that be the case? Any Tom, Dick or Harry has been able to have a piping hot pizza delivered to their door for the last 20-odd years but these pizzas, which presumably would have been given ultra-high priority, have somehow managed to get ‘a little cold’? Why not just say ‘They might be a little cold … because we’ve spent the last half-hour faffing about putting digital recorders inside them,’ and be done with it? Or, better yet, don’t draw Dalton’s attention to the temperature of the pizzas at all? Keith continues: ‘Listen, you pick up the phone anytime you want. It’s a direct line to me, I would love to talk to you.’ Nothing if not anti-social, Dalton picks up the grub and sods off, leaving Keith to nosily peer through the locked bank door. Fortunately, Dalton’s so eager to tear into his pizza that he forgets he’s meant to toss a couple of bodies out if any police come near the door.

Back inside the van, the good guys are listening to the dodgy Hawaiians. A foreign voice is talking and Darius decides the crooks must be ‘f*****g Russians’ and starts to lose patience with Keith’s modus operandi. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. Because if my guys got to shoot it out with those f*****g savages …’ Keith, presumably accustomed to being questioned at every turn, expertly placates him.

Inside the bank, Stevie collects some hostages and leads them into another room. Outside she puts her own hood up, starts wailing and Steve or Steve-O throws her into the room with them as if she’s one of the captives, before leaving with another hostage, who he vulgarly refers to as ‘Boobs’. She takes umbrage but he’s not interested and tells her to move her ‘fat ass’. Again, she finds fault with his terminology but she receives short shrift and is moved into a room with a different batch of hostages. What peculiar goings on.

We’ve reached the picture board round of the post-match interview process. Some guy is looking at photos of the hostages and telling Crockett and Tubbs who he recognises. ‘She was on line in front me, he was the teller on my line, etc etc.’ He recognises one girl because of her ‘great tits’ and Keith laughs approvingly. Mitch asks this connoisseur of the female figure if he saw any of them after the ‘painters’ arrived. ‘Yeah, I saw her one time afterwards’. ‘How are you sure you saw her again’. ‘I could see under the suit. (You) Can’t hide quality like that’. I see. Everyone else is frightened for their life and wondering if they will get to see their loved ones again, meanwhile this clown is busily picturing women ‘under the suit’. It’s easy to mock but I wonder if I’d behave any differently. You do need to try and relax in times of stress.

Next in the chair is a woman who, it has to be reported, in order for you to understand the premise of this idiotic plot point, has ‘great tits’. It’s the loud phone-talker (Nancy) from the start of the film. She holds up a photo of a man and says, ‘This guy, he almost got us all killed,’ before going on to tell Scooby Doo and Shaggy about how the unfortunate lad tried to foment an uprising and got beaten up for his trouble. No, she didn’t see him again after that. No, she doesn’t recognise anyone else. She seems to have quickly surmised that her interlocutors are total dimwits and treats them with hostility: ‘You wanna take another picture? I could bend over and pick up a pencil. (Pause) Whatever. This guy (she holds up the photo again). Asshole.’

Inside the bank, Stevie does some manual labour next to the hole in the storage room. The shot allows us to appreciate that she too has ‘great tits’. Put them in painters’ masks and you could easily get her and Nancy mixed up! Yes, establishing this fact is the only point of the scene.

A Russian-speaking policeman arrives in the van, ready to tell Keith and company what the bank dwellers are chatting about. By the way, you can easily tell that the foreign voice, singular, which they’re listening to, is reading a speech of some sort, and sounds nothing like a group of people conversing as they eat pizza, but naturally these chumps haven’t noticed. The other problem is that the language isn’t Russian after all. Next time Keith, don’t go to Darius with your linguistic questions. The lingo is apparently neither Polish or Hungarian either and, to the chagrin of all concerned, the best the man can do is narrow it down to ‘Central European. Sort of’. The outlook is bleak but Keith has a idea …

… which is to play the tape over the van’s loud speakers and see if anyone out on the street recognises the language. Steve-O leans out of a window above, before turning around and yelling, ‘Boss, I think they might be bugging the pizzas!’ Okay, of course he doesn’t, but that doesn’t make the plan any less asinine. Keith only has to walk a few yards up the street to question the gaggle of bystanders, so the van can’t be that far from the bank. A man in a hard hat and builder’s gear duly recognises the language - it’s Albanian. He’s escorted towards the van muttering, ‘what am I doing here?’ to himself disbelievingly. If you don’t want to have any dealings with the police, don’t hang around crime scenes and then actively seek to help them, you buffoon. ‘Am I getting arrested for something?’ he asks. Yes pal, it’s illegal to admit you recognise the Albanian language.

Inside the van, the reluctant helper informs Keith that he recognises the dialect but cannot actually translate it. ‘I thought you said you spoke Albanian?/ I never said that’ back and forth. He doesn’t speak it himself but he is familiar with it because ‘my ex-wife and her parents are Albanian’. All above board. There didn’t look to be that many people out by the barricades but New York is so cosmopolitan that you can’t walk a block without running into someone who has an Albanian ex-wife. Keith turns to a policewoman. ‘Call the Albanian Consulate. See if they can get somebody over here to translate this for us. Make it happen fast.’ Good job he added the last sentence because she was originally planning to tell them to pop over in their own sweet time. Our Eastern Europe correspondent is told to ‘hang around in the back’ of the van. ‘Oh man, not again,’ is his latest nonsensical utterance. The other day he recognised some Albanian for a traffic cop in the Bronx and had to wait around for ages afterwards.

Mitch comes in but, as per, he’s got squat. ‘Van was stolen two days ago, but it’s clean. No prints.’ ‘Nothing?’ asks Keith. ‘Oh, apart from a bunch we found belonging to some dude called Dalton Russell,’ says Mitch. Just kidding, he confirms that when he said there were no prints, he did indeed mean there were no prints. Keith decides to check yet again that the exotic language is Albanian. ‘100% … undeniable,’ says a weary voice from the back of the van.

Back at the bank, the kid hostage is sitting on his own in the safe playing on his video game. Dalton brings him a slice of pizza and a bottle of drink. He takes a pew and inspects the game - it seems to involve a black guy driving around a ghetto-type arear shooting other black guys. ‘How does this game work?’ asks Dalton. ‘You get points for doing dirt, like jacking a car or selling crack. And you lose points if someone jacks your ride or shoots you.’ When he’s conquered this game, I don’t think the kid will be turning his attention to Pac-man and Space Invaders. We see the protagonist in the game get out of the car and shoot someone, which makes no sense because Dalton is holding the game while the kid munches away, and Dalton doesn’t know what the game involves, let alone how to play it. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaims, stunned by the violence. ‘What’s the point of this?’ Does he mean the game or this scene? The boy thinks the former. ‘Like my man 50 says, ‘Get rich or die tryin’. Yo, you’d get mad points for knocking over the bank.’ ‘You think that’s cool?’ says Dalton, delighted to meet a fan at long last. The poor bloke is greeted by screams of terror whenever he tries to engage with the other hostages, although, in fairness, said efforts to engage usually consist of dragging one of their number away for a beat-down. ‘Hell, yeah,’ says the kid. ‘You trying to get paid too.’ Dalton sort of laughs. ‘Finish your slice, I’ll take you back to your father.’ Why’s he been taken away from his father in the first place? (‘Hey kid, one of the Steves has called in sick. Watch the safe for a while wouldya?’) ‘I got to talk to him about this game.’ Dalton promises that ‘it’s gonna be okay’. ‘Cool’ says the tyke, who doesn’t seem in the slightest need of reassurance.

The policewoman brings bad tidings on the Albanian translation front. ‘I couldn’t tell what the guy (at the Albanian consulate) was talking about. I think he wanted money. I tried the State Department. That takes a month.’ Keith wants Bob the Builder to call his ex-wife but he demurs at first. ‘I hate that b***’. He doesn’t take much persuading though and I’m starting to warm to old Bob. He’s one of those martyr types who will do almost anything to help you out, but you then have to endure a lot of moaning from him while he gets on with it.

After a pointless scene of Dalton brooding in the bank, it’s time for ex-wife hi-jinks, because Ilina Miritia is in the house. She’s hot and I think Bob should reconsider his stance, although, knowing him, she played on his kindness to get a Green Card and then quickly got rid. Ilina presents Keith with a medium-sized bag. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Parking tickets. You can fix them?’ Parking tickets are made of, what’s that substance? Oh yeah, paper. It doesn’t take up much room. To fill a bag that size would surely require hundreds of tickets, unless they are now issued in phone-book format. Ridiculous. Keith will see what he can do. Ilina gets a cigarette out while she listens to the Albanian, Mitch tells her she can’t light up and she stares him down. ‘S***. Go ahead.’ Mitch is having an ineffectual day, I suspect not for the first time. She listens for a while, blows a bit of smoke in Keith’s face and then bursts out laughing. She knows who it is but wants a guarantee on the parking tickets before she spills. ‘They’re taken care of’. ‘It’s Enver Hoxha … He was the president of Albania.’ You’d think Keith might now finally grasp what the audience has known for about half an hour but the implications of this news escape him. ‘You’re telling me the former president of Albania is in there robbing a bank?’ ‘Enver Hoxha’s dead. That’s a tape of him discussing how Albanian people are great people. They are immortal people. I wouldn’t worry.’ You see Keith, when people, be they friends, relatives, bank robbers or hostages, sit around and eat pizza, it’s not that normal for one of their number to get up and launch into a long speech. After 30 seconds of listening to Hoxha’s peroration, any sentient human would have said: ‘It’s a tape, we’ve been rumbled’. The Keystone Kops we are presented with here need to call in the ex-wife of a builder who happens to be milling around outside to tell them the same thing. Worth it though, when Ilina is the woman in question. ‘I had to listen to all this nonsense in school. Communism is great. Capitalism is evil. Lenin, Marx, blah, blah, blah. It’s a tape.’ She departs, after Keith tells her to ‘watch where (she) parks next time’. Keith and Mitch ruminate on the vicissitudes of life. ‘They wanted us to bug them so they could send us on a wild goose chase. Last time I had my Johnson pulled that good, it cost me five bucks’. In his wildest goose dreams, Dalton couldn’t have imagined it would take his adversaries this long to spot the tape scam. ‘Five bucks?’ says an immediately interested Darius, who has been quiet while the Clown Court has been in session but fancies some of this action. ‘Yeah, Tijuana. Don’t ask.’ Keith looks for a drawing board to head back to, Mitch, for reasons unknown, goes through the bag of parking tickets, finds something disgusting in there and throws it away, and, in a bank office, Steve (or Steve-O), sits eating pizza while an I-Pod plays the speeches of Enver Hoxha.

Stevie and Dalton go into the room in the bank containing the safety deposit boxes. She picks the lock on one of them. Dalton, cigarette in hand, opens it and takes some documents out of an envelope addressed to Arthur Case.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get much worse for Keith … the Mayor arrives with Madeleine in tow. He clambers into their car to touch base. Introductions. ‘Miss White’ may be able to help Keith. ‘She has a certain amount of influence in these matters’. Keith is at a loss so Madeleine takes over. ‘What the Mayor means is that there are matters at stake here that are a little bit above your pay grade. No offence.’ ‘Well, why don’t you just tell the Mayor to raise my pay grade to the proper level and problem solved?’ Ha! Great answer. Keith does well to resist the urge to put Madeleine’s patronising head through a window and instead tries to opportunistically work a pay rise out of the situation. ‘From what I hear, that would have happened a long time ago if you’d been a little more diplomatic. But we can certainly discuss it.’ Madeleine’s omnipotence extends to police pay grades it seems. Keith says he was joking although, if she wants to fast track his rise to first grade, he’s ‘not gonna talk (her) out of it’. But there’s another snag, namely the ‘hundred and forty thousand dollars that seems to have walked away from the Madrugada cheque-cashing bust’. Keith says it’ll walk right back if he gets promoted to first grade. No he doesn’t, he says he had nothing to do with it.

Back in the van, Keith decides it’s high time he placed a call to Dalton, who deigns to pick up this time. ‘Well?’ ‘Is this the President of Albania?’ The very same. They chat and Keith intimates that Dalton will soon be going to jail but Dalton thinks otherwise. ‘This time next week, I’ll be sucking down pina coladas in a hot tub with six girls named Amber and Tiffany.’ ‘More like taking a shower with two guys named Jamal and Jesus,’ Keith retorts, surprisingly confident based on the day’s events so far. ‘And here’s the bad news, that thing you’re sucking on, it’s not a pina coladaaaaaa.’ Ha again! Keith’s really coming in to his own. Dalton laughs uproariously. ‘You really want to piss me off.’ Emboldened, Keith tries to set the agenda, ‘All right, here’s where we stand,’ but Dalton isn’t having it: ‘I don’t need your f*****g status report, Serpico. I tell you where things stand.’ Dalton wants what he asked for or he’ll off some hostages. Keith is very much on the case but ‘it’s not like the City of New York has 747s waiting around for days like this’. ‘If you don’t get my plane ready, then you might as well send a hearse.’ ‘Let’s focus on how we can both get what we want, all right’ suggests Keith, although I’m not convinced Dalton is too concerned about getting a win for all parties here. More threats from Dalton. Keith’s on it, ‘let’s just try to keep everybody calm, okay?’ ‘Don’t I sound calm to you?’ Keith allows that this is indeed the case. Dalton hangs up.

Madeleine is in the diner, Steve/Steve-O is digging in the storage room, we’re fast forwarding to an interview with ‘Mr Damerjian’. ‘Is that Albanian?’ asks Keith hopefully. Ha ha! The man’s stupidity never ceases to amaze. The crooks could have picked the speeches of any obscure politician in the world to bamboozle the cops with, but of course they chose one which would throw suspicion on to one of their number. ‘It’s Armenian.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Good grief. ‘Detective, I was born in Queens. I’ve never been to Armenia, (or) Albania. I went surfing in Australia once.’ He wants some water because his throat is ‘parched’, but the ‘detectives’ find this hilarious. Reliable as clockwork, they make clumsy attempts to try and elicit a tearful confession but, as usual, they come to naught. Mr Damerjian (‘call me Kenneth’) was tied up in a room most of the time. ‘I saw you see me,’ he tells Keith. ‘I was locked up the in the room. You saw me gagged when you came in.’ God knows why Keith was touring the facility but let’s get on with it.

Back in the present, Keith’s on the phone with Dalton again, trying to negotiate more time to get the plane sorted out. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll send in some more food’. Bug the food again Keith, let’s find out what the Slovenian head of state has to say for himself! Dalton decides he will ask a question. The right answer buys them extra time, the wrong one spells bad news for a hostage or two. ‘Which weighs more? All the trains that pass through Grand Central Station in a year, or the trees cut down to print all US currency in circulation. Here’s a hint. It’s a trick question’. Dalton hangs up, Keith is bemused. Uh oh, Darius is going to weigh in. ‘It’s the trains. US money isn’t printed on paper at all. It’s cotton.’ Murmurs of agreement. He’s ‘one hundred per cent sure’ about this. ‘Okay,’ says Keith amiably and turns back to the phone, while everyone else puts their headphones on to listen in. What the ****? If they get this wrong, someone is going to be killed but hey, if Darius is ‘sure’, that’s good enough for them. Why don’t they a) get on the Internet or something and find out for certain about this, seeing as it might be an idea to cover all bases when innocent lives are at stake and b) do it in relatively sedate fashion, seeing as Dalton didn’t give them any deadline and they’re looking to play for time? ‘I got it,’ Keith tells Dalton, foolishly trying to take the credit for the answer. But here comes Mitch! ‘Wait a second. Wait a second.’ Keith tells Dalton he’ll call him back. ‘It’s a trap. They both weigh the same.’ Mitch has it all worked out. ‘They both weigh nothing.’ Keith wants to be absolutely sure on this, you simply can’t be too careful when people’s lives are at stake. ‘They both weigh the same or they both weigh nothing?’ ‘Tell him they both weigh the same. Do it now.’ For Pete’s sake, what’s the rush? Did Dalton say ‘have the answer in five minutes’? No. There is no hurry whatsoever, the cops can send someone to Mount Delphi to consult the f*****g oracle if they want to but they’re behaving as though the hostages are all going to get gunned down indiscriminately if they don’t solve this riddle within seconds. Keith turns back to the phone … without even bothering to get Mitch to explain his reasoning. The lives of these hostages are being treated with truly cavalier abandon. ‘They both weigh the same,’ Keith tells Dalton. ‘This time, send sandwiches,’ the quizmaster replies and hangs up abruptly once again. You’d think there’d be some measure of cheering, or at least a few exhalations of relief, and perhaps even, I daresay, a bit of praise for Mitch, but Keith simply says he thinks Dalton is ‘nuts’. Absent any plaudits, Mitch finally decides to give everyone a glimpse inside his computer-like brain. ‘He said ‘Grand Central Station’. Grand Central Terminal is the train station. Grand Central Station is the…’ But Keith can’t even allow Mitch this small piece of glory and butts in at the end with ‘post office’. I reckon Mitch secretly hates Keith, and that his servile manner is simply a way to get close to him before bringing him down. Darius, remarkably sanguine for a man whose imbecility almost cost someone their life, speaks up again. ‘Trains don’t pass through Grand Central. It’s the last stop for every train.’ This sparks some febrile debate about the subway system (Hilariously, Mitch asks Darius ‘How the f*** do you know?’ as if a working knowledge of such Byzantine matters as train routes is restricted to a few wise old elders) but a frustrated Keith calls for quiet. ‘Let’s just get the sandwiches.’ Keith, I’ll ask this a final time: what’s the F*****G RUSH! He makes to leave but the transport discussion quickly revs up again.

We here it continue even though we’re now inside the bank, suggesting the bugg-ers have somehow become the bug-ees. Elsewhere, the hostages are chatting nineteen to the dozen inside one of the rooms. To be more specific, some smartass (Chaim) is telling Seth, Brad and Gladys what’s what. ‘They’re robbers, not terrorists.’ ‘How do you know? They could be Al-Qaeda.’ Chaim has ‘studied these things’, he teaches ‘courses at Columbia Law on genocide, slave labour, war reparation claims’. Gladys wants to know if she can ‘sue anybody when this is over’. ‘Go nuts,’ says Chaim. In the storage room, Stevie, Steve and Steve-O examine the hole in the floor. ‘Now that’s a good looking s***hole’ says one of the men.

Night has fallen and Keith phones Sylvia. He tells her he’ll be home soon but then adds ‘It’s gonna be a long night, though, so don’t wait up for me’. She suggests coming down there, but he doesn‘t want the distraction. She saw him on TV, he looked ‘good, baby. Real good.’ He has arrived at the diner so he wraps things up and tells Madeleine to follow him. Implausibly, she, a random civilian, is going to have a quick word with the chief hostage-taker, having earlier been given the ‘ground rules’ by Keith. He calls the Riddler on his mobile and puts Madeleine on. She won’t tell Dalton her name. ‘What matters is what I can offer you.’ He wants specifics. ‘If I can be assured that certain interests are protected, I might be able to help you get what you came for.’ ‘I doubt that,’ says Dalton. Exactly. It’s truly bizarre the way Keith and Madeleine try to curry favour with Dalton by offering him quid pro quos. The outcomes people want here are not mutually compatible. Dalton wants to go scot-free with a load of loot in tow, Keith wants the polar opposite and, although Madeleine’s wishes are opaque, she has made contact through Keith, so they are unlikely to tally with Dalton’s objectives. He wants to know more about these ‘interests that (she) is trying to protect’. She parries this and asks what he is ‘hoping to get out of all this?’ ‘Rich, of course.’ She wants to chat person to person and confirms she neither works for the bank, nor is a cop. ‘Come on in’.

Keith and Madeleine head towards the bank with some cops. Keith says she’s ‘got ten minutes in there’. I know it’s not standard practice for mystery women to be ushered into a bank for tête-à-têtes with hostage takers but Keith seems to have accepted his place on the food chain. ‘I know this game is a mile over my head but I’m telling you, if you f*** me over…’ Madeleine assures him she ‘got where (she is) by collecting friends, not enemies’. She goes in.

Having been frisked, she potters over to the bank counter, where Dalton is lurking. ‘What makes you think I need help?’ ‘Well, the hundred people outside, for starters.’ Dalton’s not worried about them. Madeleine knows he knows that they’re not ‘fuelling (his) jet right now as we speak’ and lays out her offer. ‘If you give up now, I can ensure that you’ll serve the minimum. I’m thinking three years, four years at the most.’ ‘You can arrange that?’ ‘Well, you haven’t hurt anyone or stolen anything so yes, as a matter of fact, I can.’ Dalton wants more, and Madeleine has more to offer. ‘When you get out, you’ll have two million dollars.’ Dalton is intrigued. ‘Will I? How?’ It will be put ‘someplace safe’ to wait for him. Dalton, quite literally, says thanks but no thanks. Madeleine doesn’t see any alternatives for him but he nosily steers the conversation back to these mysterious ‘interests’ she keeps referencing. She remains schtum but Dalton knows it all anyway. ‘During World War II, there was an American working for a bank in Switzerland. (Cut to a shot of Case). Now, I don’t need to tell you that this period in history was rife with opportunity for people of low morals. People like this man. He used his position with the Nazis to enrich himself while all around him people were being stripped of everything they owned. Then he used his blood money to start a bank. Now, does this sound like it might be the man you work for or am I just whistling Dixie out of my ass?’ ‘I believe we understand each other,’ says Madeleine, still trying to maintain the façade that she holds the upper hand in this discussion. Dalton disabuses her of that notion, ‘what the hell can you do for me since I clearly know more than you do and I’ve planned this to perfection?’ Madeleine refuses to give up and clams that ‘if I need to, I can change your entire programme’. She lamely advises him to ‘stop being (her) problem’ and ‘start being (her) solution’ and demands two minutes in the safety deposit box room (no, not with Dalton). ‘I just need to go to one box.’ It transpires there’s no need, Dalton has the box on hand. ‘This could be very embarrassing to your employer.’ He shows her an envelope, helpfully daubed with a Swastika so we all know what‘s what. ‘He should have destroyed this a long time ago. He didn’t, so now it’s mine.’ Madeleine is happily lost for words for once so Dalton presses home his advantage. ‘Now, if the day ever comes where I have to stand before a judge and account for what I did here, you and your boss will do whatever it takes to help me.’ ‘You get out of here with that envelope and we’ll pay you a lot of money.’ Dalton will take that on board. ‘You’re not gonna tell me how you’re planning to get out of here are you?’ Madeleine asks. Au contraire. ‘I’m gonna walk right out the front door. Anything else?’ ‘How did you know about all this?’ I was wondering that myself. ‘Doesn’t matter. Fact is, all lies, all evil deeds, they stink. You can cover them up for a while, but they don’t go away.’ Well, from time to time they do go away, if the only evidence of them is in your possession and you destroy it. If you had documents about your person which proved that your fortune had been obtained by criminal means would you a) burn them before you can say ‘Jack Robinson’ b) put them through the paper shredder a billion times or c) put them in a safety deposit box at a bank, meaning there is a chance, however miniscule, that one day they will come to light. This is a cracking film but the entire plot does seem to be predicated on Chase answering c) to the above question. Anyway. Madeleine says ‘murder will out?’ Dalton says ‘precisely’ and turns to leave, although she still doesn’t get ‘what (he’s) doing here’. This pleases Dalton.

Madeleine gives Keith a heavily edited version of what occurred. ‘I told him that, since he hadn’t killed anyone, it wasn’t too late to surrender and get off with a lighter sentence’. She claims that was all folks but Keith laughs in her face. ‘You know, I don’t ordinarily get offended the first time somebody treats me like an idiot (good job) but you are pushing it.’ He wants the real scoop. ‘You don’t own me. This cheque-cashing thing, this coke bust, I can face that on my own … Talk to me.’ ‘Off the record?’ ‘Everything about you is off the record.’ She gave Dalton an ‘incentive’ and he’s supposedly ‘considering it’. Why did she have to go off the record to serve up that load of bull? Keith brings up how clever Dalton is. ‘One of your types, like the Ivy League type?’ ‘Clearly well educated.’ ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’ Keith now seems to have decided that, because Dalton and Madeleine may both have gone to Harvard, she’ll be able to predict his every move. ‘You talk like him, so think like him. What do you think he’s gonna do?’ ‘He’s not gonna kill anyone.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Because he’s not a murderer.’ ‘How do you know? … Most of the guys up in Sing Sing weren’t murderers until they killed somebody. You never know what a person will do until you push him into a corner.’ ‘But it doesn’t seem like you’ve pushed him into a corner.’ ‘It doesn’t does it? Seems more like he chose the corner.’ Keith thinks that she’s right and sends her on her way. ‘You got a card in case I need to call you?’ Madeleine spots a chance to make an arrogant exit. ‘I don’t think you can afford me.’ He doesn’t want your over-rated services woman, it may be something pertaining to the bank robbery. He tells her to ‘kiss (his) black ass’. ‘Careful, Detective Frazier. My bite’s much worse than my bark.’

Interview room. Abbot and Costello are talking to the young boy (Brian, eight and three-quarters) and his dad. Brian says he wasn’t scared in the bank. ‘I’m from Brooklyn .. Guns don’t scare me.’ Brian tells them about his encounter with Dalton. He looks at the photos but can’t pick Dalton out. ‘With the mask, they look all the same.’ Keith resignedly agrees.

A long-haired guy (Paul) with a criminal record is next for the treatment. Mitch reads out the salient details. ‘Attempted robbery. Liquor store. Well, this was a real step up for a small-timer like you, huh?’ Paul denies involvement and it turns out the liquor store charge was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘I was out with some friends and they held up a liquor store. What was I supposed to do?’ He accuses Mitch of being a ‘Wassa Wassa’. It’s a Spanish phrase for ‘a person that don’t come to your neighbourhood’. Keith pipes up: ‘How do you say ‘Rikers Island’ in Spanish?’ Droll Keith, but not helpful.

The Rabbi looks at the photos but doesn’t recognise anyone so Keith, eager not to end their chat empty-handed, decides to get some marital advice. ‘What do you think a guy like me should pay for a diamond ring?’ It all depends. ‘If you’d like, I could give you my nephew’s number … You’ll get a very good deal.’

Ren and Stimpy stare ‘aggressively’ at a woman, who I think is Stevie. They want to see what she’s wearing under her painter’s gear, the cads! She’s well endowed. Mitch: ‘You see, there’s just you and one other woman that fit the physical description of the female suspect.’ She’s curious for further details. ‘It’s your height, your age, and your, um…’ Mitch is finding it all a bit awkward but the good ship Keith sails in to harbour to help him out. ‘Your cup size.’ ‘So, I violated Section 34 double-D?’ she quips. The lads look back at her blankly.

Inside Man (part one)

2007-10-10T04:23:00.000-07:00

‘My name is Dalton Russell,’ says Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), a thinking man’s type of bank robber, who is sitting in the darkness, staring moodily into the camera, as he delivers this introductory monologue. ‘Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and I never repeat myself. I’ve told you my name. That’s the ‘who’. The ‘where’ could most readily be described as a prison cell (shot of poor old Dalton sitting reading in a cramped corner). But there’s a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being in prison (shots of Dalton lying on his front as he writes a letter or something and then doing a few press-ups - he must be really bored). The ‘what’ is easy. Recently I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery (I don’t think that sentence quite makes sense but we get the gist). That’s also the ‘when’. As for the ‘why’, beyond the obvious financial motivation, it’s exceedingly simple. Because I can. Which leaves us only with the ‘how’. And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.’ Intriguing, and not a little pretentious. The credits start.

Shots of New York, specifically the ‘Manhattan Trust Bank’ and also a van, presumably heading towards it. En route the van picks up a couple of characters in painting garb. This is a Spike Lee ‘joint’ by the way. That‘s promising. I like Spike Lee.

The ‘painters’, all nattily attired in masks and shades, park up outside the bank and prepare their ‘equipment’. Inside, it’s business as usual. A father speaks to his son as they wait in the queue, people talk business across desks, and a young woman chats in obnoxiously loud fashion on her hands-free mobile (‘Yeah, we’ll get lobster. I’ll put it on Mr Ansinori’s card’). A bank official discreetly tries to get her to shut up and she agrees to play ball but then complains to her phone buddy about the situation. ‘I didn’t know I was in a library. It’s a f*****g bank.’ A succinct argument, but specious, considering no one, anywhere, in any environment you care to name, wants to hear about her plans to milk the unfortunate Mr Ansinori for an crustacean-centric slap-up dinner. While this goes on, one of the painters strolls in, gets out a spotlight and begins pointing it around. I’m not convinced this is standard practice but he carries on unchecked. A shot of the bank’s security monitors shows us that the spotlight is disabling all the CCTV cameras but, again, whoever is meant to be monitoring the er, monitors, appears to be asleep at the wheel. Dalton, for I believe it is he, continues taking out the cameras at his leisure.

Some more painters come in and secure the door behind themselves. At long last, a rat is smelt and a security guard confronts the rascals. It proves a bad move because Dalton ghosts up behind him and sticks in a gun in his back for his trouble. ‘Everybody get down on the f*****g floor! Now!’ he bellows. Chaos reigns, as women scream and the miscreants, now wielding huge rifles, lob a few smoke bombs around and yell instructions. Dalton notices an elderly chap remaining upright and marches towards him. ‘You get the same treatment as everyone else, Rabbi,’ he explains even-handedly, then pushes the religious gent to the floor. ‘Now, my friends and I are making a very large withdrawal from this bank,’ Dalton informs the expectant throng, who had previously presumed they had stumbled into a controversial piece of performance art. ‘Anybody gets in our way, gets a bullet in the brain.’

Out on the street, Sergeant Collins (Victor Colicchio) is strolling past the bank, keeping his nose clean, when a passer-by remarks: ‘Hey officer, there’s smoke coming out of there,’ and keeps on walking, arm in arm with his lady. Not much point hanging around to see if you can be of any assistance is there? Smoke comes out of banks all the time. Collins attempts to investigate but the locked door keeps him at bay until Dalton eventually opens it a tad and sticks a gun in his face. There’s a warning to snoopers everywhere. ‘I have got hostages,’ he reports. ‘You f*****g cops come near this door, I start killing people. I’m not f*****g kidding man.’ His communication skills are rudimentary but you can’t deny he gets his message across. Dalton disappears, leaving Collins to radio in the details, while shooing potential bank customers away.

‘Baby, I’m fighting for my life over here.’ In the police station, streetwise, ultra-confident detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) is on the phone to his hot girlfriend Sylvia (Cassandra Freeman), also a cop. Keith explains, in unrealistic detail, (‘Do you know what kind of thin ice I’m on right now with this cheque-cashing thing? They want to lock me up.’ ‘But you didn’t take it.’ ‘Of course I didn’t take it baby. It’s just some lying drug dealer trying to save his own ass by f*****g me over.’) why they can’t get a ‘bigger place’ which somehow also pertains to her brother, ‘the only family (she’s) got’ getting nicked for stealing a car. It’s hardly the most acrimonious of disputes but peace is declared anyway and Keith promises ‘Big Willie and the twins for you when I get home.’ Very romantic. ‘I got the handcuffs,’ she purrs. ‘I got the gun,’ he croons. ‘I got a sudden urge to try and go out with a cop,’ I muse. Detective Bill ‘Mitch’ Mitchell (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has been listening in to the spicy chit-chat and doesn’t miss the opportunity to lampoon his partner’s sleazy conversational style with a brilliantly crafted one-liner: ‘Big Willie and the twins, huh?’ Or maybe not. Keith witters on about his girlfriend’s brother’s list of offences, how it’s awkward having the young brat sleeping in the next room and how ‘if we got married then things would be different’. No, I don’t see why he thinks that’s the case either. There’s no rule that says just because you’re married, you don’t have to provide shelter for a young brat, and a bigger place with a young brat residing in it, is still a place with a young brat residing in it. Anyway, he doesn’t fancy marriage, for various clichéd reasons, including the expense of the ring, even though the fact he’s been married before ‘crops’ up. ‘You give her a ring?’ ‘Yeah, but she won’t call me back.’ The witty repartee is brought to a halt by the arrival of Captain Coughlin (Peter Gerety) who brings news of the bank situ: ‘Christmas came early for you this year.’ With ‘Grossman’ on vacation, it’s up to the comedy kings to save the day - the ‘cheque-cashing thing’ notwithstanding (‘I just threw you a bone’). The boys head off, practically high-fiving each other at the news that dozens of innocent people are being menaced by gunmen. ‘This is it, baby. The show!’ Mitch enthuses. More banter as Keith puts on his hat. ‘Look out bad guys, here I come,’ he remarks. He’s not really much of a team player.

The hare is on the move! Police vehicles pull up outside the bank in their droves and their passengers swarm out, armed to the teeth. The area is taped off to exclude the public, who nosily cluster on the other side of some barriers, and a TV news crew arrives.

Elsewhere, a lackey called Katherine enters a huge office to inform ‘Mr (Arthur) Case’ (Christopher Plummer) that ‘there’s a robbery in progress at one of our branches’. He’s appropriately concerned and, after checking nobody has been hurt, asks which of their branches it is. ‘20 Exchange Place.’ He asks again, the deaf old coot. ‘20 Exchange Place’. He thanks her, slowly sits down and murmurs ‘Oh dear God’ to himself.

Batman and Robin arrive at the bank and exit their car purposefully. Collins is on hand and, having ascertained that Keith is the ‘hostage negotiator’ (‘Come on out crooks, I’ve got Big Willie and the twins waiting for you!’), he brings him up to speed. Keith tells Collins he did well and decides there’s time for some small talk. ‘You ever had a gun stuck in your face before?’ Collins has, ‘by a 12-year-old’. Keith commiserates and departs, after Collins says he’ll stick around ‘at least until we make contact’. What good is he going to be? These dilatory cops will do anything to put off doing the paperwork.

Bank interior. The hostages are herded into an area next to a huge safe. Dalton struts around aggressively, and a female co-conspirator (‘Stevie’ - Kim Director) orders the bank employees to one side, while the unfortunate customers stay where they are. Dalton wants everyone’s mobile phones and keys. His minions scurry around with sacks, which the hostages drop the goods into, but some chap hasn’t got a phone. Dalton ambles over and asks his name, which is Peter Hammond (Peter Frechette). He’s left his phone at home but Dalton can’t hide his scepticism. ‘Peter, think very carefully about how you answer the next question because if you get it wrong, your headstone will read: here lies Peter Hammond, hero, who valiantly attempted to prevent a brilliant bank robbery by trying to hide his cellular phone, but wound up getting shot in the f*****g head.’ Peter is sweating hard, but assures Dalton that his phone has indeed been left at home. Dalton starts going through the phones in the sack, fiddling around with them and then chucking them onto the floor, until he finds one which has P.Hammond on speed dial (as well as Mom, Bucky (?), Eric, Ian, Voice and Home. P.Hammond is top of the tree - I suspect an office romance is afoot). Dalton dials the number and a rap song ring tone starts to play in an office right next to where they are standing. Dalton marches in, Hammond looks justifiably terrified. Bit of bad luck that his office was right next to the ‘Trade in your mobile phone for nothing’ HQ eh what? ‘Okay, I f****d up. I’m sorry. Please,’ he begs. ‘Hey. Don’t worry about it,’ says Dalton magnanimously, handing him back his phone. However, he heads back into the office and shuts the door, and through the glass we can see him gesticulating humorously as he debates with himself how best to punish this nitwit. He settles for dragging him into the office, smacking him in the face a few times and then kicking him, which we also watch through the glass. Dalton doesn’t seem to be a massive fan of rap song ring tones. He comes back out, to be greeted by unhappy squealing. ‘Anyone else here smarter than me?’ he wonders. Most of the hostages sensibly treat it as a rhetorical question, although one woman tearfully says ‘no’, evidently being of the mind that beneath Dalton’s gruff exterior lurks a keen intellect.

For his next trick, Dalton bowls over to a guy called Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) who is holding up some keys. He takes the keys and the young lad we saw having a chin wag with his dad earlier also offers him some sort of Gameboy. Dalton lets him keep it, he has more pressing matters to deal with. ‘I need all of you to strip down to your underwear’. I like a man who will go to almost any lengths to get a few cheap thrills and also approve of the word usage. He wouldn’t like you to strip off, he doesn’t want you to strip off - he needs you to strip off. This is a twisted individual indeed. The hostages do as they are instructed, then Dalton walks down the line, pulls out three women, turns to his pals and says ‘These will do team, let’s get out of here’. No he doesn’t, he heads over to a woman at the end of the line, who has defiantly remained fully clothed. ‘Believe me. This is the only situation where I’d ask you to do this,’ he tells her. No need to be so rude about it! She’s not on board with the plan and replies that ‘(he) should be ashamed of (him)self’. Quite right. As usual, rather than debate the matter in a reasoned, adult fashion, Dalton points his gun at her face. She still refuses to disrobe. ‘What’s with you mishegoyim? Go ahead. Make my day.’ Stevie drags her away, the rest of the hostages are all given painting suits and masks to put on.

Danger mouse and Penfold enter the ‘command post’ van, from which the police are basing their operations. Captain John Darius (Willem Dafoe) is inside. Introductions dispensed with, Keith heads down memory lane. ‘You may remember, we worked that hospital thing on 93rd, during my training?’ Darius does remember. ‘Oh yeah. That was a real shame,’ he responds. Doesn’t sound like Keith’s training went altogether smoothly, though he doesn’t seem too haunted by the recollection. He asks what’s happening in the bank but Darius hasn’t got the foggiest because none of the cameras are working and, in any case, ‘the way this works, Mr Frazier, is I deal with Mr Grossman’. Keith will not be fobbed off and informs Darius that, due to Grossman’s poorly-timed holiday, ‘Detective Frazier is the big dick today, all right?’ Mitch looks on admiringly, he loves it when Keith lays the smack down to these cheeky upstarts. Darius accepts the situation and calls out for ‘Berk’ to ‘get these guys some vests’. They’re on the team! Keith lays the schedule out for Darius. Him and Mitch are ‘gonna take a walk down to the diner’ while Darius prepares ‘a detailed briefing’. That doesn’t sound like an entirely equitable distribution of the workload but a chastened Darius puts it through on the nod. ‘Good to see you, Captain,’ Keith smirks before exiting.

Outside the van, Mitch has the temerity to question Keith’s strategy. ‘Shouldn’t we be in there (the van, not the bank)’ he enquires. Keith thinks not (‘Your call, Keith’ says Mitch, quickly falling into line) and waffles on for a bit about how the proper cops think hostage negotiator types are a bunch of jokers because ‘us being here means there’s a mental side to it that they don’t get’. How such a bunch of thickoes manage to solve a single crime is a daily mystery to Keith. But wait, he’s not as self-assured as he seems. ‘I keep waiting for someone higher up on the food chain to show up and say ‘Here’s what we do’’. Mitch asks about the ‘hospital thing’. ‘Guy shot himself, (and) shot his girlfriend.’ These pesky trainee negotiators are the bane of the criminal classes everywhere! The boys head into the diner for a well-earned bite to eat, unused to all this hard work. I mean, there can’t be that many hostage situations surely, and Grossman clearly handles the bulk of them. What on earth do Poirot and Hastings do with all their time?

Inside the bank there’s a bald man sitting on a chair struggling to breathe (Herman Gluck - Gerry Vichi). ‘I’ve told you I’ve got a heart condition,’ he manages to wheeze. He is pushed onto the street by the robbers but the fact he is in a hooded all-over body suit and a mask bewilders the police, who point their guns at him and start shouting. They get the mask off and he blurts out a few nuggets of information (‘If you come near the bank he’ll throw out two dead bodies’) then asks if he’s going to be on the box. Of course you are my friend, every channel out there knows that some old fool babbling incoherently is must-see TV.

A middle-aged man sits in an interrogation room and burbles on about how he ‘thought about … not seeing my wife again’ or his kids for that matter. The lighting is different and the tenor of his chat indicates that this is some time in the future, that he got out of the bank alive, and that the Hardy Boys, who are looking on impassively, still haven’t got a clue what the hell went on.
Back to the bank. The hostages are all sitting together in various rooms, wearing their suits and masks, while the robbers perambulate around the place until they encounter a large store room. ‘Beautiful,’ murmurs Dalton, as he stares at some boxes.

We arrive at the impressive offices of sexy, smug, quasi-enigmatic Mrs Fixit Madeleine White (Jodie Foster) as she deals with a client whose ‘only intention is to spend time in your wonderful city’. He certainly won’t be having dealings with his uncle, who he hasn’t seen in nine years, according to a source of Madeleine’s. ‘You are extremely well informed,’ observes the uncle-avoider. ‘I have to be,’ Madeleine explains. Her PA comes in and announces: ‘I have a Mr Arthur Case on the phone for you,’ saying the name in a pained, over-pronounced fashion, as if he’s got Elvis Presley on the blower instead of some boring old bank bigwig. Nonetheless, she winds up her meeting quick-smart and heads to her desk, upon which is a computer, upon the screen of which appears … her PA. What a nightmare job for the lad - purely on a whim his boss can click her mouse and see what he’s getting up to, although it doesn’t look like she can see what’s on his own terminal, so presumably he can read ‘Films in full’ and she’ll think he’s busy studying statistical surveys regarding how regularly people see their uncles. They have some back and forth about whether it’s Case himself on the line or his secretary. It’s him, eventually he’s put through and Madeleine dismissively puts her computer onto screensaver mode. But the PA is left trapped in existential limbo, wondering if she’s still spying on him, while she talks to Case, of if he dare crack open his sandwiches.

Madeleine and Case talk. He wonders if they have ‘met formally’ but she doesn’t ‘believe we have’. ‘Yet you’re always turning up at my July 4th parties in Southampton,’ he points out. ‘Yes, we, er, know some of the same people,’ says Madeleine. All well and good, but if these no-doubt raucous jamborees really are hosted by Case, surely, as a guest, you at least say ‘thanks very much for having me’ at some point. The manners of the upper classes are quite reprehensible. Case is unworried about such niceties and gets to the point. ‘I have a small problem which requires someone with very special skills and complete discretion’. She’s interested and agrees to meet him outside in five.

Back to the more grimy lighting, as another, rather battered-looking, former hostage, tells the Fabulous Baker Boys what occurred in the bank. ‘They had a kind of genius plan for throwing us out of whack and depriving us of any way of controlling ourselves.’ A different ex-hostage elucidates on this: ‘All I know is that they called each other a variation of Steve. Steven, Steve-O.’ For some reason, Keith thinks this is a load of bull and demands the truth but this guy, a dark-haired man, aged 30ish, simply continues with his yarn. ‘They had AK-47s out. Four of them.’ A grinning Keith jumps all over this. ‘You know a lot about guns,’ he says, leaving out the ‘Ergo, you’re obviously a criminal mastermind. Hurry up and spill the beans, me and Mitch need to get down to the diner’ which is clearly on his mind. But the ace up his sleeve is trumped once again. ‘Everybody knows what an AK-47 is,’ says the exasperated suspect. ‘Everybody?’ asks Mitch in disbelief. ‘Anybody who’s ever watched a decent action movie would.’ And so would people who’d watched ‘Inside Man’. Ha ha!

Holmes and Watson are getting really desperate now. They’ve resorted to grilling our friend Herman Gluck. Keith decides to subtly circle his prey, hoping to relax him and trick him into a mistake by cleverly probing him about apparently unrelated matters … - ‘You ever rob a bank before?’ .. - but then remembers the diner shuts within the hour and opts for a more full-on approach. Baldy laughs this off and denies ever stealing so much as a dollar, although after Keith points at him and says ‘That one time’ about three times, he breaks down and confesses all. ‘I stole a nickel from my grandmother’s pocketbook once. She was Polish’ Good work lads! Keith radios upstairs: ‘Well boss, we’re still all at sea on the old bank robbery but you can consider the case of the missing Polish nickel firmly closed.’

Darius wants to speak with Keith. He knows where to find him! ‘Look, Detective, I didn’t mean to give you a hard time back there,’ is his opening salvo. Keith tells him not to worry. Darius relays Herman’s news, namely that, as far as Dalton and co are concerned, cops near the bank door = two dead bodies. Darius and his team have everything under control, including the phones, which have been ‘cut and diverted into M.C.C. We’re the only ones they’re gonna call.’ There’s a pause. All the bases are covered, so it seems Keith is expected to phone the robbers. The only problem is, he can’t be bothered. Darius is surprised but, to Keith, it ‘doesn’t feel right yet … I’m not gonna call him and ask what I can do for him. Let’s see what he does. Come on Mitch, back to the diner!’ Okay, he doesn’t say that last bit. ‘Your call,’ says Darius and they head into the van.

Madeleine and Case take a stroll by the river. Case has apparently told Madeleine that ‘there are family heirlooms inside (his) safety deposit box’. She rambles on about how the fact Case’s own ‘people’ aren’t handling it tells her ‘that there’s something in that box that you don’t even want your closest aides to know about’. For some reason she feels the need to point out that, if the box contains ‘the launch codes for a nuclear missile, then let’s just say we no longer have an agreement’. Case is as tired of her prattling as the rest of the us and asks if she’s finished. He assures her the contents of the box pose ‘no danger whatsoever to anyone’. Nonetheless, Madeleine can’t guarantee results because ‘there are men with guns in there’. More to and fro about this mysterious box. Case doesn’t want anybody knowing what’s inside it. ‘The contents of that box are of great value to me. So long as they remain my secret.’ If they’re exposed he’ll ‘face some difficult questions,’ so Madeleine gathers that the box is to stay ‘locked, or it disappears’. She is confident she can get the job done but Case, who is something of a sourpuss, ‘can’t help but be sceptical’. ‘Whoever gave you my number got the same deal,’ Madeleine replies. ‘Clearly, they must have been satisfied.’ She puts her sunglasses on in characteristically self-satisfied fashion. I think a ‘now look Case, I’m on the Case’ retort would have been more endearing.

Inside the bank of fun, a male robber (Steve - Carlos Andres Gomez) is moving things around in the aforementioned store room. Dalton comes in. ‘Steve?’ ‘It’s time for Steve-O’. Dalton leaves, Steve starts smacking holes in the floor.

Outside, Mitch is immensely pleased with himself because, having learnt the crooks came in disguised as painters, he has found a painter’s van! He eagerly shows Keith the fruits of his labour but his rewards are scant. Keith easily pulls off the sign on the van (‘Perfectly planned painting - we never leave until the job is done!’), and tells Mitch to have it checked for prints. He strolls off, Mitch scampering in his slipstream.

Tired of Mitch’s pathetic efforts to please, Keith decides it’s time to give the robbers a call. No luck though, Dalton sits there letting the phone ring. ‘Okay. Nothing yet,’ Keith tells the van, somewhat superfluously, considering they were all listening in on the call. Some video footage has arrived though, which Mobile Command Officer Rourke (Daryl Mitchell) plays back for the group. They watch Dalton offing the camera with his spotlight. Clueless as ever, Keith can’t work out why none of the customers are noticing this horseplay, ‘you’d think it (the spotlight)’d be pretty bright’. Rourke explains all: ‘Infrared bulb. Humans can’t see it, but a video camera will pick it up.’

Back to the interviews. Next to face Keith and Mitch’s ‘bad cop, even worse cop’ routine is Miriam, the woman who wouldn’t get her kit off, despite Dalton’s charming entreaties. She’s pretty upset and even Laurel and Hardy don’t seem to consider her a viable suspect. They cheer her up by pretending otherwise (‘Could you give us the names of the bank robbers, maybe?’ ‘Did you rob the bank?’) and everyone has a good laugh. Nice guys, great comedy duo, lousy thief-takers.

A hostage is thrust out of the bank with what looks like a suitcase around his neck. Once again, the cops surround him and start barking at him. ‘Put your hands on your head and get down on your f*****g knees’. They finally notice that his hands are tied behind his back and that he can’t speak very easily because he has a mask over his mouth. They pull it down and the hostage turns out to be Vikram. The cops wonder if the suitcase is a bomb. ‘Oh s***! A f*****g Arab!’ These cops aren’t exactly ice-cool under pressure. ‘What? No, I’m a Sikh,’ says Vikram, who assures them that he is not walking around with a bomb around his neck. He is wrestled to the ground for his trouble while two policemen bring the suitcase over to Keith and company, who look on as Vikram is led away, angrily complaining because the cops have wrenched his turban off.

In the middle of a busy open-plan office, some old cove is getting his schedule sorted out. ‘Your honour,’ says Madeleine, who has come striding in. The old cove in question is the mayor. He greets her effusively and she thanks him for seeing her at short notice. ‘I always have time to put on a tux and eat free food for a good cause,’ he says, and she requests his presence at a fundraiser for spinal cord research. However, it seems such convivial chat may have been for the benefit of passers-by because, once they are alone, the gloves come off. ‘What the f*** do you want?’ ‘A favour.’ ‘Which kind.’ ‘The last one I’ll ever ask of you.’ ‘That’s the kind I had in mind.’ Madeleine wants the mayor to take her down to the bank and get ‘whoever’s in charge to extend (her) every courtesy’. The mayor is unsure about the soundness of such a scheme and informs Madeleine she is ‘out of (her) f*****g mind’ and that it would be ‘impossible’ to accede to her request. She laughs this off and tells him to ‘call in a few markers’. ‘I may have to give out a few,’ he responds. ‘Then that’s exactly what’ll you do,’ rasps Madeleine, clearly confident of ultimate victory. The mayor gazes at her respectfully. ‘You’re a magnificent c***,’ he ludicrously remarks. ‘Thank you,’ says Madeleine and turns tail. You see, when you reach the upper climes of society, words formerly considered extremely offensive suddenly become gracious compliments. Try it next time you run into a member of the aristocracy.

A news reporter appraises her viewers of the situation, telling us nothing we don’t already know, as we watch the painters’ van get towed away. There’s plenty of work to be done but the dynamic duo are ensconced in the diner once again, and they’ve even deigned to bring Darius along. They’re trying to interview Vikram but he’s ‘not talking to anybody without a turban’. I think he wants his own turban back, rather than for the interview to be conducted by a turbaned individual. He’s ‘not an Arab, by the way, like your cops called me outside’. Darius sniffs damaging controversy and shrewdly tries to tamper it down by … speaking to Vikram as if he’s five years old: ‘I don’t think you heard that …you were probably disoriented.’ Vikram ‘heard what (he) heard’ and again calls for his turban. Mitch points out the gravity of the situation and suggests Vikram chat to them and worry about his turban later. ‘First you beat me, and now you want my help.’ ‘You need to start thinking about your co-workers (Vik worked at the bank, forgot to mention that earlier).’ And don’t forget Vikram, those Neanderthal cops are nothing to do with our heroes. ‘I could apologise on behalf of the NYPD but that was not us. We are detectives.’ Just like The Thompson Twins! Vikram condescends to answer a couple of questions, while holding some ice to his forehead, but détente does not last long. ‘I’m f*****g tired of this s***. What happened to my f****** civil rights?’ He moans about how he’s also harassed at airports, where he ‘can’t go through security without a ‘random’ selection’. Keith hunts for the bright side: ‘I bet you can get a cab, though,’ and Vikram concedes that is ‘one of the perks’.

Keith reads out the message from the robbers, which was scrawled on the object Vikram carried out. You’d think he might have glanced over this missive before going for a doughnut with Vik, but better late than never. ‘(They want) Two buses with full gas tanks. One jumbo jet with full gas tank and pilots at JFK, parked at the end of the runway.’ Keith adds, ‘they give us until nine pm to do this, then they kill one hostage every hour in front of TV cameras,’ then reads aloud again: ‘Bank is secured with Semtex, we will demonstrate if necessary.’ But Dalton’s refusal to so much as give Keith the time of day has really rubbed him up the wrong way. ‘Till I talk to them, they get nothing. For now, we wait’. But before the three amigos can scarper back to the diner, Arthur Case arrives to say howdy-do. Good old Art was wondering if he ‘might be of some assistance’. When he asks what the malefactors have demanded, Darius tells him ‘they want a jet’. ‘Oh, I see (long pause), would you like me to arrange one for you? (very long pause, as Keith, Mitch and Darius look disbelievingly at Case, who realises that’s probably not a great idea) I’m so sorry. I must have misunderstood.’ Case wants to hang around (‘those are my people in there’) but Collins arrives to turf him out. Case graciously thanks him and leaves, as Collins gives the gang an uncalled for ‘who is this geriatric buffon’ look behind his back.

A hostage pops out of the bank with a note, which Darius accepts from a cop. The note reads ‘Fifty plus hungry people need food now’ but, standing alone, he reads it aloud as ‘Fifty hungry people need food now’. Poor old Darius isn’t the brightest spark is he, having to enunciate the words when he’s reading and even then getting it wrong? Either that, or the film makers wanted us to know what was on the note without us having to bother reading it ourselves and imparted the information in spectacularly maladroit fashion. Why not have Darius glance at it, then take it to Keith, who could read it aloud for Mitch’s benefit? Anyway, there’s 30 seconds of your life you wish you could have back. Keith looks pleased by the note because …

… he’s going to bug the food! The police woman detailed to carry out this wheeze informs him ‘pizza’s the best. No sandwiches’. Mitch doesn’t see why it matters but, instead of seeking clarification from the source, he asks Keith if ‘she (is) for real’. What obnoxious behaviour. Keith asks her if she is ‘for real’. You’d think bugging the hostage-takers might have come up during his training at some point, but I expect he was getting something to eat while that lecture was on. The lady patiently explains: ‘If we send in, say, ten pizza boxes with transmitters, maybe we’ll get some conversation if we give them something to group around. Give them each a sandwich, it’s hit or miss. They can move around and I don’t have 50 transmitters.’ If I was in Dalton’s shoes, I’d specify exactly what sort of food was delivered. If it all goes wrong it could be your last opportunity to decide for yourself what you eat, so why leave it up to these jokers? Keith is holding a thin, pen-like object. ‘What’s this?’ ‘It’s a digital recorder.’ How on earth should he know? ‘James Bond s***,’ he says, impressed. In ‘Life on Mars’ the policeman goes back in time from the present day and can’t believe how backward everything is, but I think the big plot twist coming here is that Keith’s going to turn out to be a cop somehow transported forwards from the 1950s. That’s the only explanation for his sense of wonder at what is surely bog-standard police equipment. Mitch asks Keith if he will request the release of a hostage. Pizzas for hostages scandal? Keith points out that they already got one and then pays homage to ‘Mr Wendal’ by Arrested Development: ‘He gave us a hostage, we’ll give him some food.’

2007-10-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

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