Money Plays stars Roy Scheider as a depressed, widowed single father and professional gambler whose life gets a much-needed jolt when the prostitute he's been seeing on a monthly basis (Sonia Braga) acquires more than $500,000 in cash under shady circumstances and has him gamble with it. Unfortunately for the pair, however, the mobsters who lost the money are not happy with its new owners, and they try their darnedest to get it back. A fairly cheap-looking, stylistically unimpressive mixture of stilted drama and molasses-slow action, Money Plays sometimes hints at evolving into an affecting portrait of two tired, lonely people finding comfort in one another. It's continually hamstrung, however, by a silly, sometimes unintentionally funny script that shortchanges the story's emotional core by pushing its main characters through a contrived and predictable series of plot twists that hinge on hoary, clumsily handled coincidences. The best thing about Money Plays is the work of Scheider and Braga, both of whom give their aging underachievers a convincing aura of sadness and desperation. Had writer-director Frank D. Gilroy's script focused on their characters' slow, unsteady, needy relationship, the film probably would have been a lot more interesting; instead, Gilroy has underwritten their relationship so that it never really amounts to much. Factor in an unnecessary, momentum-killing montage sequence featuring Scheider, Braga, and Scheider's daughter all going on a boating expedition, and Money Plays ends up as little more than mediocre cable fodder.