Money Kings takes place in the sort of blue-collar New York town where everyone is poor but proud, keeping a dignified stiff upper lip despite an abundance of struggles. Peter Falk stars as an unceasingly pleasant bookie and bar owner who runs his smalltime bookmaking operation like a cross between a social-service agency and a clubhouse. Among Falk's clientele is a loutish but proud drunk played by the predictably awful Timothy Hutton. Hutton is married to a hard-working but dignified waitress and factory worker played by Lauren Holly, who, along with her role in last year's forgettable No Looking Back, is racking up quite a collection of unconvincing turns as noble blue-collar waitresses. Into this web of pleasantness wanders Freddie Prinze Jr. as a hot-headed small-time hood who becomes Falk's unwilling partner. Prinze has made a career of playing—or underplaying—charming, puppyish hunks, but here he's called upon to display the malevolent menace of a young Robert De Niro, with laughably disastrous results. Snorting cocaine, spouting racial epithets, making good wives do evil things, and generally behaving like an all-around juvenile delinquent, Prinze comes off like Kirk Cameron playing Andrew Dice Clay. Sadly, Prinze's terrible performance is by far the most entertaining thing about Money Kings, a bland, underwritten slice-of-life drama that segues into an unconvincing soap opera in its last 20 minutes. Falk gives a predictably nuanced and subtle performance, but the film is otherwise an actor's showcase for a slew of very bad actors. Slow, dull, and depressing, Money Kings is for Prinze completists only.