MartinHafer "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.

Turd Ferguson Low budget movie which may work to this movies advantage. No frills, no glitz. Probably about 98% of this movie either takes place at Mahoneys place employment or the casino. There's a romantic side to this story but it thankfully does not take away from the film but actually adds to it without interference to the story.Hoffman utilizes so many different emotions in this movie it really is remarkable, a bit of joy, despair, anxiety plus being an asshole. The script is excellent, keeps a nice pace, very well acted, very very good cast not only with Hoffman, Hurt and Driver but a sound supporting ensemble.

tonysletterbox I read an earlier review on this movie saying that Seymour-Hoffman was up there with all the great actors like Brando and Pacino but this is untrue because Hoffman is not really an actor - he's a genius. You know Brando and Pacino are acting, albeit, remarkably, but I never saw Hoffman even look like he was acting in this movie. Makes me wonder whether even Mahowny was as natural as Hoffman.A lot of actors seem to sleepwalk around a screenplay and they look like it. But somehow Hoffman always gets a part that suits him to a t so the more sleep-like-walking he does the more realistic his presence seems to be. This was especially true for me in this movie and, also, in "Charlie Wilson's War".I gave this 9, although, in a different story probably an 8, but this is my kinda story and that, with Hoffman, is what I loved about it. I didn't even notice any of the other nuances of the movie.

pepekwa 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.