21 (Review)

21 is based on the Ben Mezrich book "Bringing Down the House”. It’s about an MIT student named Ben Campbell, who can’t afford to go to Harvard med school. His physics professor Micky Rosa offers him a spot in his secret card counting team earning tons of money by counting cards at Blackjack in Las Vegas casinos. Ben gets into the lifestyle, which inevitably comes around to bite him in the ass. I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a while now, despite never reading the book or viewing any of director Robert Luketic’s previous films. I found it to be a lively drama, but it’s kept from greatness by some rotten direction choices. The movie had an interesting premise and how these guys were able to work the system intrigued me. Sadly, I never felt like I was really seeing the tension of the card-counting system. There’s loads of exposition in a training sequence, and while I got the gist of it, the actual mechanics of the gang’s scheme never felt like they were expounded upon seemed to cause the blackjack sequences to lose some of the excitement they’re suppose to contain.

From the start of the film, the direction of the plot is too predictable. The big rule Ben has to follow is keeping his emotions out of the game and never gamble, so obviously, there will be a point where he gives in to all the fun and fails to pay attention to the consequences. There are some relatively weak side stories along the way such as the needless conflict between Ben and his best friends, conflict with a fellow team member, and of course, the forced love story. The best friends melodrama fails to make an impact (or make much sense) as it comes out of nowhere and the conflict doesn’t seem to stem from anything other than Ben not hanging out with them on weekends(when he’s in Vegas). The quarrel with the teammate was predictable and didn’t service the story in any conceivable way and the same goes for the love story which was just there for the sake of having it, a horrible trend in movies these days.

It also doesn’t help that apart from Ben, nobody in the movie has any perceivable sympathy. Luketic made the poor decision to basically sacrifice the human element of the film which creates problems throughout the story, like when we’re expected to relate to the card counting team or Ben’s friends but they come off as twats who have nothing better to do than pursue their own interests and screw each other over. The antagonistic forces of Micky and the obsolete Vegas video surveillance security forces are just plain infuriating and obnoxious and I couldn’t wait for their comeuppance…which to the film’s credit was pretty satisfying.

In spite of all this, 21 was still fairly enjoyable to watch, primarily because it’s well paced and does a decent job of making the strategy architecture thrilling through use of detail-oriented photography and special effect. Jim Sturgess delivers an excellent performance as Ben and the same goes to Kevin Spacey as Micky (at least until Micky start acting like smug twerp). It’s an okay movie that could have been much better if a little more common sense had been applied the production.