Martin Scorcese owes Walter Tevis an apology. Mr. Oscar badly manhandled Tevis's The Color of Money, and his most egregious deviation is inventing a major character so Tom Cruise could flash the big whites while leaning over the smooth green. This has absolutely nothing to do with the novel, which is about Fast Eddie's mid-life crisis. Eddie does not tutor a young buck in the good hustle in Tevis's novel. I'm also gonna throw some hate in Richard Price's lap, who probably wrote the screenplay with one hand while Cruise's agent twisted the other behind his back.

No, Eddie is not the young stud in the hall anymore, and having settled into a secure and numbing post-shark existence, he wakes up at 50 to realize he is dead inside. When a sleazy TV producer offers him a series of events with Minnesota Fats that 'may' get picked up by Wide World of Sports, Eddie realizes he has set aside the only thing that makes him feel like a man. It takes him awhile to fully embrace his fate, and Tevis employs his big-tourney-at-the-end formula too neatly to further that end, but Eddie's journey of self-realization at the tender age of 50 is poignant. This is a man running from his gifts and trying to be what they say you should, and it nearly kills him. The road back to himself is filled with hard choices, but for Eddie, it's the road of resuscitation.