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Movie Review: 21
Brains, blackjack doesn’t make '21' interesting
By John Wirt
jwirt@theadvocate.com
Advocate movie critic
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PLAY OFFICIAL TRAILER
Ben Campbell is a bright student among many bright students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But not being a product of privilege, he needs a prestigious scholarship to realize his dream of attending Harvard Medical School.
During an interview for that scholarship, Ben hears bad news. “What can you tell me, Ben, that’s going to dazzle me?” the interviewer asks.
Brilliance and hard work are not enough.
Ben, earnestly played by British actor Jim Sturgess (Across The Universe, The Other Boleyn Girl), knows he’s not dazzling and won’t get the scholarship.
But opportunity knocks in the form of Micky Rosa, an MIT professor who recruits and trains exceptionally bright students for a team of card sharks.
21 fictionalizes Ben Mezrich’s best-selling nonfiction book, Bringing Down The House, which tells the story about a real group of MIT students that beats Las Vegas via a system of signals and card counting.
In the film, Kevin Spacey plays Rosa as a grim taskmaster. He dubs the enterprise a business and won’t tolerate lapses of discipline. There’s too much money riding on the business for team members to take chances. And there is genuine risk involved, because the ominous Cole Williams, an old-school Vegas type (Laurence Fishburne), is watching.
The blackjack team from MIT jets back and forth between the academic life in Boston and the high life in Vegas. Ben, though he’d been reluctant to join at first, quickly becomes the team’s star. But the temptations of Vegas are great. The team members’ extracurricular activities resemble college spring break, the difference being that this spring break happens every weekend.
Unfortunately, 21’s all-important blackjack games are surprisingly dull. The team uses the same signals again and again in sloppy, redundant scenes. The signals are so obvious and repetitive that it’s a wonder the players aren’t caught during their first game.
Stultifying melodrama revolving around the tensions that arise within the team are just as false. At least the action-filled finale has some energy, but it’s so predictable.
If the experience of the real-life MIT students who beat Vegas was as dreary and silly as 21, what happened in Vegas should have stayed in Vegas.
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