Rating: 
March 28, 2008
The fascinating story of six college students who took Las Vegas for millions gets dealt a bad hand in "21," which turns their true-life saga into a slick, shallow and thoroughly generic caper flick.
Flashily directed by Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde"), it's often quite watchable - especially thanks to Kevin Spacey, hamming it up as a Mephistophelean math professor - but lacks much in the way of moral or dramatic weight.
"21" is very, very loosely based on Ben Mezrich's nonfiction book "Bringing Down the House," whose protagonist was an Asian-American math whiz at MIT.
In the movie he's magically transformed into a Caucasian Boston Southie named Ben - blandly played by Brit actor Jim Sturgess ("Across the Universe"), whose performance seems largely focused on an annoying mid-Atlantic accent.
Against his better judgment, MIT senior Ben is seduced into joining a squad of brainiac card counters by statistics prof Mickey Rosa (Spacey) who organizes weekly junkets to Las Vegas.
Ben, you see, has been accepted into Harvard Medical School and needs to raise $300,000 in tuition. He quickly learns that counting cards at the 21 table is far more lucrative than his job as an assistant manager at J.Crew.
Soon, he's blowing off his fellow mathletes on a robotics project to spend all his weekends in Las Vegas, where card counting is legal - but frowned upon by the casinos, to say the least.
At first, Ben and his cohorts - a jealous veteran (Jacob Pitts) who he shares player duties with, as well as a couple of undeveloped Asian-American characters (Aaron Yoo and Liza Lapira) who act as spotters along with a hottie named Lisa (Kate Bosworth) - are having a blast.
Eventually, they attract the attention of a brutal security consultant (Laurence Fishburne) who has a history with Mickey.
A mechanically plotted (and predictable) series of double-crosses ensues, climaxing with a ridiculous happy ending - and an even worse remix of the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want."
Even if you give the movie a pass for abandoning the more interesting truth, it often craps out on its own terms. Despite a two-hour running time, Luketic and his screenwriters are unable to coherently explain how card counting works.
And the characters' motivations are often inscrutable. Nothing in the script, or Sturgess' performance, indicates exactly how shy nerd Ben comes to embrace the life of a high roller, abandoning his plans to quit once he raises enough money for Harvard.
Lisa, played by the entirely too mature Bosworth, is even more of a puzzle. At first, she seems so focused on flirting with Ben strictly to keep him in the game that you suspect she's sleeping with the prof. Then she abruptly becomes Ben's love interest.
And how exactly is Mickey able to arrange these elaborate weekly junkets - the kids always stay in luxe suites - without arousing suspicions at the casinos?
It's always fun to see Spacey in snarky mode, but as one of the producers of "21," the Oscar winner certainly knows that without real consequences, you don't have much in the way of drama.
MORE: Lou Lumenick's Movies Blog
