Like so many movies based on true stories, 21 clearly doesn’t think that the truth is good enough. Taken from Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich’s popular nonfiction book about a group of MIT students who made millions of dollars at blackjack via a sophisticated card-counting system, 21 fictionalizes its story and plays up the glitz and thrills of Las Vegas over the potential insights into obsessive behavior and gambling culture it might have offered.
No one involved in the movie seems to be up to the task of telling this often dark and potentially complex story. The script by Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb is stuffed with clichés and overwrought exchanges, and director Robert Luketic, previously responsible for romantic comedies both fun (Legally Blonde, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!) and abominable (Monster-in-Law), seems lost when charged with bringing heft and seriousness to the material. Lead actor Jim Sturgess is entirely bland and unconvincing as MIT senior Ben Campbell, whose need for funds to pay for medical school drives him to join the card-counting team run by math professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey).
The five students constantly practice their strategy for winning at blackjack, then head to Vegas on weekends to put it into effect. Unfortunately, instead of going to real Vegas, they go to movie Vegas, all strip clubs and high-roller suites and flashy outfits. There’s no authentic sense of the town, either geographically (much of the action was filmed at the Red Rock Casino, which the movie makes look like it’s right on the Strip) or thematically. Desperate to avoid anything that might resemble a boring math lecture, Luketic shoots the gambling scenes with a headache-inducing barrage of special effects, his camera swooping in among CGI cards and chips to distract you from the fact that he’s not offering up any interesting information on how these people are beating the casinos at their own game.
In the absence of the in-depth explanations that come from a good piece of nonfiction prose, the movie ought to be carried by compelling characters, but none of the main players has more than one dimension. (The team’s two Asian-American members don’t even get that much.) The central moral conflict comes from Ben’s increasing obsession with winning at blackjack, to the point where he neglects his friends and sabotages his tentative romance with fellow team member Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). But his transformation from timid nerd to flashy douchebag (and then back again, sort of) is never effectively justified either in the script or in Sturgess’ performance.
None of the main stars is remotely convincing as a smart person, and Spacey plays Micky with such oozing malevolence that he comes off like he’s still channeling Lex Luthor. When Micky admonishes Ben early in the film to always remember that he’s “counting, not gambling,” you know that exact mistake is what will eventually lead to the confrontation that tears the two apart. Nearly every plot move is telegraphed in a similarly obvious fashion, and the movie’s climax piles on unnecessary twists that occasionally succeed at increasing the suspense, but mostly just end up reminding you that the real story has been buried under all this unnecessary flash and fantasy.
21
** 1/2
Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Spacey
Directed by Robert Luketic
Rated PG-13