21

Columbia Pictures
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Robert Luketic
Written By: Peter Steinfeld, Allan Loeb, from “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” by Ben Mezrich
Cast: Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Josh Gad, Jack McGee, Sam Golzari
Screened at: AMC Kips Bay, NYC, 3/24/08
Opens: March 28, 2008

Two movies about card playing opened in March. One, Zak Penn’s “The Grand,” features a number of A-list comics like Woody Harrelson, in a mockumentary about a poker tournament, but the dialogue is almost completely improvised. The other, “21,” is about the game of Blackjack at Vegas, which some believe to be the country’s most popular gambling diversion. Peter Steinfeld’s dialogue is razor-sharp, each participant following the rules of his speaking part just as Blackjack players are bound by regulations. Do not get carried away: follow the script. Which film do you think is better? Of course it’s the second. Rules count. They exist for a reason. If the Democratic Party says “No primaries are to be held in January,” then there is no reason to allow the votes of any state that breaks the rule and holds primaries in January, right? And scripted dialogue can usually be trusted to trump improvisations. That’s the rule.

Of the many things that “21” conveys to the audience aside from the benefits of following the rules it’s that people’s brains are more like computers than we think. A 56K dial-up modem cannot possibly develop the speed of a 20 megabite cable modem. A computer with a gigabite memory will memorize more than one with a memory of 500 megs. And try and you might to tutor one person with an I.Q. of 110, that person will not match the productivity of a fellow with a 160 I.Q.

Directed by Robert Luketic, “21” stars 27-year-old British performer Jim Sturgess in the role of Ben Campbell (“Across the Universe”), one of the smartest people ever to hit the campus of M.I.T. He has a 4.0 average, got 1590 on the SAT, and is headed for Harvard Medical School. His mom has some money, but nowhere near the $300,000 he needs for the four graduate years. With some initial reluctance, he buys into a plan by his math professor, Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey)—a creative teacher whose boards are filled with formulas but whose favorite formula is employed to win big at the Vegas gaming tables. With college seniors Jill (Kate Bosworth), Choi (Aaron Yoo), Kianna (Liza Lapira) and Fisher (Jacob Pitts), Ben flies on weekends to the casinos where he and his team engage in card-counting and with signals that make Blackjack look like a sport such as baseball and football. Clasping your hands behind your back could mean “Come over to my table—the deck is hot.” Their only enemies are the securities team watching a dozen screens upstairs and led by a menacing Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne), and their own emotions, which on one fateful night allow Ben to get carried away by disregarding his team signals.

The plot is adapted from Ben Mezrich’s “Bringing Down the House” (available at Amazon.com for just nine bucks), about M.I.T. students who actually made Vegas casinos millions of dollars poorer during the 1990’s. The most interesting character here is Ben, who morphs from an arrow-straight dude working for eight dollars an hour in a clothing establishment to a full-scale bon vivant—dressing sharply, recognized and treated with deference from the staff at one casino. Kevin Spacey is, of course, eminently reliable, but his persona does not really change throughout except for the anger he displays toward two students on his team who do not follow the rules.

Gray Marshall’s visual effects are spectacular, Russell Carpenter’s lenses displaying cards in a variety of positions, faster than a champion three-card monty dealer. The deck is a character in itself while chips come at us in the audience as though this were a 3-D movie. Carpenter is also adept in contrasting a gray, snowy Boston with sunny Nevada, as Australian-born director Luketic (“Legally Blonde) sets up Ben’s best friend Miles (Josh Gad) as the good guy, a senior who has teamed up with Ben to compete for a science prize with a robotics development but is soon shunned when Ben has more money on his mind than can be gained by playing things straight. When Ben becomes a doctor four years from now, he may have to fend with malpractice suits, but these legal actions could not be more dangerous than what he faces in the casino when the thuggish security guards determine to end his winning streak.

Rated PG-13. 122 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online