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" 21
Review " |
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Posted on
10:00 a.m. PST April 11, 2008 |
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / March 28, 2008
By any fair count, "21"
is -372, and that's a shame, since a lot of people were
holding out high hopes for this one. Recent converts to the
neo-Vegas gambling craze craved the buzz they get from
drawing a skeet flush. Readers of the film's nonfiction
source, Ben Mezrich's "Bringing Down the House: The Inside
Story of
Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions," wanted the
book's grubby little details. Fans of British actor Jim
Sturgess hoped the dreamy "Across the Universe" star would
ascend to the next rung of fame. MIT alums looked forward to
seeing their campus on screen.
Me, I just wanted a decent card movie, and it didn't even
have to be as good as "Rounders."
But everyone gets dealt a stiff hand in this bust from
director Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde," "Monster-in-Law")
and writers Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb. "21" spins a
hackneyed, shallow morality tale about the rise and fall of
a young Boston innocent named Ben Campbell (Sturgess,
tripping awkwardly over a generic American accent), an MIT
undergrad who's desperate to come up with the tuition for
Harvard Med.
Building a competition-winning robocar with his nerd friends
(Josh Gad and Sam Golzari) won't do the trick, but then Ben,
a born numbers adept, is invited to join a secret campus
blackjack club led by a Mephistophelean professor played by
Kevin Spacey. That's right, ham's on the menu at the MIT
cafeteria.
If only there were more of it. Pleasant in a watery sort of
way, Sturgess evinces little of the feckless charm he showed
in "Universe." Worse, his chemistry with Kate Bosworth, as a
beauteous, blond fellow member of the card-counting club, is
less than zero. The team members meet by night, test their
strategy in underground Chinatown gambling dens - does
Governor Patrick know about this? - and fly to Vegas on the
weekends for delirious jags of running the numbers and the
winnings up.
As with all morality tales, we're shown the benefits of
high-rolling - the clothes! the luxury suites! the
soft-focus sex! - and then solemnly informed it's bad for
us. Ben's head swells and lessons must be learned. Gunning
for the students and their mentor is Cole Williams (Laurence
Fishburne), an old-school Vegas security chief with an even
older school name. Perversely, "21" gives Fishburne and
Spacey, two of our most enjoyably overripe thespians, only
one scene together.
But wait - there's more. Disappointment No. 1: The details
of card-counting are skimped. A classroom example is trotted
out early in the film - the old game-show probability
paradox - but it's not explained very well and the scenes at
the blackjack tables don't clear it up. Maybe the gambling
industry has a stake in this movie? Maybe the filmmakers
just think we're stupid?
Disappointment No. 2: Ethnics go to the back of the bus. The
name of the hero of Mezrich's nonfiction bestseller, "Kevin
Lewis," was an alias for student Jeff Ma; the real MIT team
was primarily Asian-American. "21" waves the wand and turns
them into three Anglos, one idiot klepto Korean-American
(Aaron Yoo), and Kianna (Liza Lapira), a mixed-race woman
who seems far and away the smartest person here.
Disappointment No. 3: MIT looks suspiciously like Boston
University. Wait, it is Boston University. Not a deal
breaker, but indicative of the movie's lack of interest in
local realism, despite appearances by the South Street Diner
and a corner in Chucktown. Any film that begins with a shot
of a racing shell on the Charles is off to a bad start.
Disappointment No. 4: Spacey phones it in. Often
entertainingly, and you grasp at his heavy-lidded sarcasm as
though it were a life raft, but this isn't a real movie and
he knows it. Vapid and over-edited, "21" is a studio
concoction that doesn't even have the courage of its own
cynicism. By the time the end credits roll around, you
realize nothing's actually been risked. It's the gambling
equivalent of Go Fish.
The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be
gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because
they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for
these people: Suckers.
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