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Truly Dreadful Film

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

"Owning Mahowny" is a hard film for me to love...much like "Catch Me If You Can" or "The Polka King". This is because all three are true stories about sociopaths who spent much of their lives hurting, stealing and lying to people...and making a movie about them just gives these awful people more notoriety. I certainly would hope they wouldn't benefit financially from the films and I hate to imagine the films making them heroes in the eyes of the viewers....but I fear both are indeed the case for these god-awful people.This story is about a man who committed the largest single person bank fraud in Canadian history...$10,000,000. The film begins with Mahowny* (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) deeply in dept for gambling...and he soon makes it worse by trying to gamble his way out of the problem. To do this, he is playing fast and loose with the bank's customers as well as creating dummy corporations to help hide this! A part of the story is about the culpability of the casinos in the embezzlement. The film contends that in many ways the casinos (embodied in the form of a sleazy guy played by John Hurt) should have known that a man making a very modest salary could NOT legally be gambling millions. And, they profited by his repeated trips to Vegas and Atlantic City...so there wasn't a lot of incentive to get him to stop or to alert authorities.The film features some nice acting and is an understated sort of film...with little glitz despite the locations involved. There also are no big surprises...as the IMDB page talks all about the embezzlement and the film never leads up to it...he's already spending money he doesn't have when the story begins. So there's little in the way of suspense...and the ending was incredibly anti-climactic. Despite this, it's interesting and worth seeing...though far from a must-see.By the way, the DVD does NOT have closed captions for the hearing impaired.

Greetings from Lithuania."Owning Mahowny" (2003) is very solid movie based on the true story about a gambler - an addict for gambling. It's not about game - it's about the player. Philip Seymour Hoffman owns every scene he is in, and this is basically a one man tour de force in acting department. Superb performance by late great actor, this film is another reminder of what a true talent and now safe to say legendary actor he was. "Owning Mahowny" is sad and true story. It's superbly paced, at running time 1 h 45 min it doesn't drag - it's a movie making that simply glues you to the screen during the whole process. Overall, you can see this movie only for Philip Seymour Hoffman - great performance as usual. The movie itself is also very well made and it get a high score for being based on the true story.

Seymour Hoffman is one of the best actors on the planet and it a shame he doesn't get recognition in roles like this. His portrayal of a mild mannered bank manager with a boring job who siphons money from his bank to fund his high stakes hobby was utterly compelling, I love movies about gambling and this one really showed us in clear detail the traits of a hardened gambler. On the other side of the table, it was also very interesting to see how casinos try and lure the "whales" back to the table by any means. The ending was unclear and I still don't really know how Mahowny really got away so lightly but as it was a true story, you cant really question that. But that doesn't take away from a remarkable story and a stellar acting performance.

The brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffmann stars as Dan Mahowny in the film "Owning Mahowny", as a bank employee with a serious gambling problem. The film recreates a real incident that occurred in Toronto in the early 1980's when Brian Molony, a bank clerk, embezzled over ten million dollars from his bank over an 18-month period. This character driven film presents the man as a quiet, but dependable employee. What seems less visible is his awkward, but determined drive to gamble. The internal struggle Hoffmann's character goes through when confronted with walking away from the table with a big win in one sequence stands as the core of the film. This is a film about addiction in a less seen arena than drugs or alcohol, but the effects and the enabling seem quite similar. Unfortunately, the film does not fare well beyond Hoffmann's award worthy performance. The story is too flat and at times too uninvolving to be sustained by his performance alone.