Second Best

Balding New Jerseyite Elliot (Pantoliano) refers to himself—in heavyhearted narration, printed flyers and to anyone within earshot—as "the loser." While actor Pantoliano happens to be a world-champion whiner (Memento, The Matrix), the idea that his character has been carrying on like this for years, always with a cadre of supportive friends nodding patiently and supporting him financially, is a contrivance bordering on the infuriating. The arrival of childhood friend Richard (Gaines), now a big-shot Hollywood producer, sends the movie into cloying self-aggrandizement.