There are lots of problems with “Even Money,” but most can be traced to a simple case of bad timing. For starters, New York has recently been inundated by movies involving gambling and card games, notably Curtis Hanson’s train wreck “Lucky You” and Zak Penn’s mediocre mockumentary “The Grand,” which showed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Second, art houses have been flooded in recent years with films in the style of “Babel” and “Crash,” which interweave the lives of unsuspecting strangers.

Further, with war and genocide dominating the headlines these days, the thought of a rich white woman in frittering away her surplus life savings at the poker table just doesn’t seem like the most pressing problem on the horizon. It takes some nerve to offer a movie in which one of the key emotional payoffs involves a sobbing Kim Basinger, as a successful author, sitting beside a roaring fire in her suburban mansion and declaring, “I have a gambling addiction!” It may be the gutsiest scene at the movies this year, but it fails resolutely — particularly since she’s the least sympathetic character in the movie.

As we are told early on in “Even Money” by Dr. Frasier Crane — er, Kelsey Grammer, a narrator who tries from the get-go to tie this overblown drama to some sort of universal theme about life and loss — we are all gamblers, anteing up in our own small ways, trying to get more money and, in turn, more happiness out of life.

Besides Carol (a solemn Ms. Basinger), there’s her husband Tom (an earnest Ray Liotta), who starts to worry about his wife as she disappears for entire days, supposedly writing a follow-up to her successful novel but really escaping to the casino, where she plays the slots as only an addict could. Then there’s Clyde (a charismatic Forest Whitaker), who cherishes the success of his younger brother on the basketball court, but who clouds that affection by betting on the young man’s high school games in hopes of repaying his sizable debt to an angry loan shark who’s counting the hours.

Strangely, the three most interesting characters in this rather lengthy parade of faces and names are those who are pushed to the sidelines. Walter (a cheerful Danny DeVito) is a middle-aged magician who roams the casino at all hours of the day, hitting patrons up for tips in exchange for impromptu magic tricks, all the while praying for the day he might strike it rich and be able to launch the magic act of his dreams. Detective Brunner (Mr. Grammer) is a limping investigator who was wounded back in his army days and the far more interesting counterpart to the able-bodied but dim-witted detectives (Jay Mohr and Grant Sullivan) with whom he works — colleagues who are polishing both sides of the coin, moonlighting as bookies of their own. It’s Brunner who figures out early on that it was Victor (Tim Roth) who must have killed one of the city’s biggest bookies in an effort to increase his own business. The ruthless Victor, ironically, is the most interesting of them all, a taut and sophisticated connoisseur of wealth, eating only the choicest steaks for dinner and chatting with his pet bird when he’s not putting the squeeze on his debtors.

Ah, but here’s the problem. We’re some 600 words into this review, and still caught up in identifying the dozens of players who get caught in this web of high-stakes melodrama. It’s the same problem that sinks so many works that adhere to the “Crash” model: In lieu of actual exposition or character development, filmmakers are turning instead to the quantity of sentiment. “Babel” had not just one, or two, but four different climaxes; in movies like this we never really get to know these characters because, from scene one, we can feel the guiding hand of the filmmakers, steering each story toward tragedy.

Such is “Even Money.” Every scene seems custom-tailored to up the ante, as when Clyde cheers on his brother with an ulterior motive clouding his mind, when Carol lies to her husband so she can prolong her betting binges, and when Walter finally shares with a stranger his secret plan, hidden away in his alley-bound mobile home, for the mother of all magic shows. There’s so much brooding that the ship feels doomed from the outset, sailing intentionally into a hurricane.

But while it might work in the terrorism-minded “Babel,” the racism-obsessed “Crash,” or the meltdown mania of “Magnolia,” something about gambling, particularly gambling among middle-to-upper-class white people (save Mr. Whitaker’s struggling plumber, a suspiciously nasty depiction of the film’s only prominent minority), seems disingenuous. I return to my thoughts about timing: We’ve seen too many gambling movies recently to consider “Even Money” a novelty, seen too many of these interweaving plots to find the structure the least bit novel, and seen far too many true-life stories of disaster and misery to care about Ms. Basinger, cast adrift in suburbia without her life savings.

What about the real urban gambling addicts who are cashing in their food stamps? Can we get a movie about them? No fireplace required.