Pocket Money

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, Pocket Money follows Paul Newman’s Jim Kane as he and an erratic associate (Lee Marvin’s Leonard) attempt to procure a herd of cows for a less-than-reliable rancher. Filmmaker Stuart Rosenberg, working from Terry Malick’s screenplay, delivers an excessively deliberate drama that remains entirely uninteresting and uninvolving for the duration of its often endless 102 minutes, as the movie’s relentlessly off-kilter atmosphere, which is reflected in everything from its oddball characters to its aggressively quirky dialogue, essentially prevents the viewer from even fleetingly connecting to the material and paves the way for a meandering midsection that’s nothing short of disastrous – with the admittedly strong efforts of both Newman and Marvin, as a result, rendered completely and hopelessly moot. The picture’s slapdash, ramshackle sensibilities, which are hardly as charming as Rosenberg clearly believes, do little to alleviate the pervasively tiresome bent of Malick’s far-from-authentic and utterly amateurish screenplay, and it’s not surprising to note, certainly, that Pocket Money‘s interminable closing stretch ensures that the whole thing concludes on as anticlimactic and underwhelming a note as one could possibly envision – with the end result a misbegotten misfire that does, on top of everything else, contain a few hard-to-watch instances of animal cruelty.

* out of ****