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21 The Movie Busts But With Style - 04-06-08
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Author: Marc
 April 6 - 21 the movie is based on the true story of how a group of math students from MIT made a small fortune by card counting at blackjack tables in Las Vegas. The film is actually based on the book "Bringing Down The House", which was a very loose account of the facts. 21 is even more simplistic than the book and is almost completely devoid of substance, but it does have a lot of style and it taps into the Vegas myth that most Americans readily buy into, so there is no doubt why it is the biggest box office movie in the country.
The film is measured and ultimately at least twenty minutes too long, but the first half hour is full of promise with a sympathetic lead character and a nicely realized depiction of college life. The best scene in the movie sees him dragged from his books by another team member (Fisher, a waste of an interesting character) to meet the underground card-counting club led by a sinister professor.
Ben, the lead, wants to know if their scheme is illegal and what risks are involved. Now bear in mind that card counting is not a con or a scam. It is nothing like a three-card monte trick where people are duped out of their money. Casinos don't allow it and would like people to think that it is illegal, and they will certainly ban you from playing with them if they catch you, so it is a little depressing when the professor behind the team is shown to be a nefarious, amoral crook.
It is also depressing to learn the paint-by-numbers moral of this tale - namely that Vegas corrupts and winning in Vegas corrupts absolutely. As soon as you have a couple of hundred thousand dollars in your fancy suit pockets all thoughts of Harvard Medical school and your Machiavellian outlook of playing blackjack as a means to an end go out the window. When the abandonment of your means to an end philosophy is seen as a sad moment then you get an idea of how bankrupting the Las Vegas lifestyle must be.
After the first half an hour when the film seems to have all the time in the world it speeds up into a condescending shorthand that is infuriating. See the other members of the team? They're cool looking Asians, and that's the sum total of their character development. Oh no wait, the Asian guy steals stuff. The great love story between the two leads? Let's have them share a first kiss in a strip club when she's drunk and he could care less. The security guys who are supposed to be great at what they do? Let's have the kids make 17 trips to the same casino and then only get caught when the slighted professor places an anonymous call to the security guys. That's a telephone number he has on his cell phone, obviously.
There is no real conflict in the story, it has no core, but it is so well filmed that you'll want to book a weekend trip to the Strip post haste. It is a very slickly made bad film, and it will be responsible for the most annoying catchphrase of the year, which I guarantee you will hear at a blackjack table from some 20-something irritant: "winner winner chicken dinner." If this is your idea of clever, catchy, or interesting then by all means go and see the movie. It is a harmless, anodyne experience.
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