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91Casino Jack is really a look at how the culture of Washington was rebuilt to sell itself to the highest bidder.
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91Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney takes a labyrinthine, detail-laden story and crafts an attention-holding film, polemical without ranting.
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Indispensable viewing.
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83Gibney has enough material for a dozen movies here, but his attempt at an overview, however unwieldy, paints one hell of a nauseating picture.
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83Ultimately, the blight is so overwhelming that the film collapses from corruption overload.
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80What's breathtaking here is the scope of greed, corruption, arrogance and above all cynicism on display, not just regarding the system of government but the people it ostensibly serves.
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80A film that's always on the move, a smart, lively, thoroughly involving doc about a complex, critical subject.
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75As one interviewee opines: "It's all about the money."
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75As entertaining as it is exasperating.
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75Abramoff may be in prison but the mindset that produced him -- and the pay-to-play government it needs to survive -- is triumphant.
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74The narrative trots all over the globe, including stops for labor exploitation in the Marianas Islands, dealings with Russian mobsters, ripping off Indian tribes in the desert southwest, and jetting to Scotland for rounds of golf with impressionable politicians.
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70A fascinating, strangely funny and remarkable film about events so incredible you'll likely have a hard time believing what you see onscreen.
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70Gibney does finally kick the focus off Abramoff to bemoan the legalized-bribery system that's the rule, not the exception.
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70As Gibney follows Abramoff through the decades, he traces a solid line from Reagan's mantra of deregulation to the financial collapse of 2008, showing how three decades of procapitalist lobbying have pushed most Americans out into the cold.
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67Tonally, it all makes sense, but there's such a thing as overmuchness. Gibney laudably launches a withering attack here on the pay-to-play relationship between lobbyists and lawmakers. But this viewer felt withered, too, by the end of his battering ram of a movie.
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63The amount of information the viewer is asked to process is voluminous and never stops coming.
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60That the film is overlong ultimately testifies to its importance, though after a while, the outrageous details start to run together like surreal satire. Except, of course, that it's all true.
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Running two hours, "Casino Jack" is an exhaustive and exhausting elaboration of Abramoff's canon of greed and power that will enervate audiences with a surfeit of details.
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50To cover the Abramoff scandal is to follow tangent after tangent, until it seems as if prison was in the lobbyist's plans from the beginning.
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50Gibney's documentary strains to make sense of the minutiae without losing the audience's attention over its formidable, two-hour length.
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50A liability of Casino Jack is the relative absence of its subject.
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40The big absence here is the man himself; Gibney couldn't get the jailed Abramoff on camera, either due to unwillingness or a Justice Department intervention. Whatever the reason, it's crippling.
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