America loves to play cards. Hollywood loves to gamble. Over the years, and with increasing frequency, the movie industry has tried to exploit this by giving us films about card-playing: The Cincinnati Kid, California Split, Maverick, Rounders, The Cooler, Lucky You. Hell, even the last James Bond film managed to shoehorn in a pivotal Texas Hold ’Em sequence. The new film, 21, adds to this ever-increasing pot, providing yet another Vegas-bound drama for people who have watched “Celebrity Poker Showdown” once or twice.
21 cribs its true-life inspiration from Ben Mezrich’s bio-book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. This allows producers to cast a bunch of sexy young 20-somethings and focus on the party-hearty lifestyle of Vegas’ penthouse suites.
 Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em: Jim Sturgess tries to play his cards right in the sexy-if-stretched gambling flick, 21. |
Jim Sturgess (last glanced in Across the Universe) stars as Ben Campbell (our first sign this film is going to deviate from Ben Mezrich’s book by quite a wide margin). Ben’s a hotshot student at M.I.T. He’s allegedly the smartest kid in school but, since he’s not a minority, he doesn’t merit a grad school scholarship. (Hurry up and heal that racial divide, Obama!) Ben wants to go on to med school at Harvard. But where is he going to raise the $300,000 tuition?
Enter fast-talking mathematics professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey). Every semester, Rosa schools a tight-knit underground group of math whizzes on the finer points of card-counting. On weekends, they jet out to Las Vegas and break the bank. Ben, being a cowardly nerd, wants nothing to do with it. A little pressure from the brainy babe in the group (Blue Crush cutie Kate Bosworth), though, and Ben folds like a house of cards.
Soon, he’s the team’s chief moneymaker, raking in the dough with his superior card-counting abilities and his emotionless attitude. In time, greed, jealousy and (PG-13-rated) sexual shenanigans get in the way, threatening to put an end to our college kids’ high-rolling escapades. Yes, these innocent youngsters, who suddenly strike it rich, throw their lot in with criminals and blow off school along with all their loyal, longtime friends, actually have a lesson to learn here.
| Trailer for 21. |
While 21 is a generally fun romp, most of its drama feels heavily fabricated. We get an idea of how card counting works (or used to, anyway), but the screenwriters are obliged to tack on all the usual Hollywood trappings, including comedy relief, a love story, a bad guy and a crazy twist ending.
If you’re a card-counter, you know enough to guess what the flop will bring, just as, if you’re a regular moviegoer, you know enough to guess where this film is headed. Astute audience members will most likely guess this film’s climax shortly after the halfway mark. That’s unfortunate, because it bleeds a lot of the tension out of the film, making the finale seem rather formulaic. Director Robert Luketic (best known for mainstream rom-coms like Legally Blonde) doesn’t seem particularly concerned by that, gladly tossing reality aside for an escapist fantasy about big money, long falls and heaps of poetic justice. Nobody truly wins in this deal; but young audiences, toward whom all this lightweight glitz is geared anyway, will be perfectly happy to come out even.
