It's not often that a recently convicted felon is the subject of two movies in the same year — Casino Jack,

the bio-pic starring Kevin Spacey, and Alex Gibney's docu-exposé Casino Jack and the United States of

Money — but Jack Abramoff is irresistible: Beverly Hills High graduate and Washington über-lobbyist,

Orthodox Jewish owner of a D.C. kosher restaurant and scammer of Indian tribes, pioneer of the

emerging Hard Right (along with his college pals Karl Rove, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist) and

Hollywood movie producer (the 1988 war film Red Scorpion). Abramoff certainly saw himself as star

material. "Why would you want to make a documentary?" he once wrote. "No one watches

documentaries. You should make an action film!"

That email is cited at the beginning of the documentary (now available on DVD), which is much the more

entertaining and instructive of the two films. In part that's because it spans the breadth as well as the

depth of Abramoff's career; Gibney offers footage of the College Republican parading his charisma, of

his high-wired coconspirator Michael Scanlon and of the Native American chiefs whose casinos he billed

millions to wipe one another out. Going halfway to Hollywood, Gibney calls on Stanley Tucci to lend his

voice to Abramoff memos, and Paul Rudd to do Scanlon's, and provides a reenactment of the killing of

Gus Boulis, a Miami businessman connected to Abramoff pal Adam Kidan, who was gunned down in Fort

Lauderdale. A one-man Doc-of-the-Month Club — this year he released three other films (My Trip to

Al-Qaeda, Freakonomics and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) in addition to the Abramoff

caper — Gibney clarifies the lobbyist's intricate, infamous deals, while pouring enough pizzazz into his

movie to make it what Abramoff wanted: an action film!

George Hickenlooper, the director of the Spacey Casino Jack, also had a nonfiction background (docs on

Dennis Hopper, director Monte Hellman and the Francis Coppola epic Apocalypse Now); even some of

his fiction films, like Factory Girl, were based in fact. For his final film — he died in October, at 47 —

Hickenlooper worked from a script by Norman Snider, who wrote TV bio-pics of Los Angeles madam

Heidi Fleiss and the porn pioneers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Both men have had experience bending sordid

real life into sometimes equally sordid drama.

Alas, they've hobbled their chances at an epic tale by concentrating on the final, crumbling years of

Abramoff's reign; the movie is less Raging Bull than the last episode of an overextended horror film

series. Hickenlooper injects the proceedings with a cinematic hyperactivity; he'll use four shots of Jack from four different angles in a few seconds, when a simple reaction shot would do. The movie is giddy fun,

but no match for the sick thrill of the real perpetrators. Though Spencer Garrett does an expert

impersonation of Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader and convicted money launderer, he can't

measure up to DeLay's smiling mug shot or his rendition of "Wild Thing" on Dancing With the Stars.

Partly because Scanlon was the least public of the story's major malefactors, Barry Pepper can bring the

man to adrenaline-fueled life as a roaring, strutting alpha male. And Jon Lovitz makes Kidan a bracingly

appalling caricature of grossness and self-doubt. The big casting problem is Spacey. An actor whose gift

is suggesting, not displaying — revealing character by seeming to conceal it — he captures little of the

confident showman in Abramoff; this Jack is a knave ever brooding that his house of cards is about to

collapse. Some love of the game is required here. Abramoff, as shown in Gibney's doc, could easily be

played by Seth Rogen, if he could ramp up his urgency quotient. Oddly, Hollywood often refrains from

casting Jewish actors in Jewish roles; by choosing Spacey to be Abramoff, Hickenlooper chose a fine

actor without even a soupĉon of chutzpah. That's the main reason Casino Jack lacks the felonious

zest of the Jack Abramoff.