Runtime: 1
hr. 58 min.
Rating: PG-13
some violence, and sexual content including partial nudity
Cast: Jim
Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts,
Laurence Fishburne
Director:
Robert Luketic
Writers:
Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb
Genres:
Psychological Thriller, Thriller
Yawn.
Hmm, things I’d
rather do than sit through another screening of Robert Luketic’s 21.
Watch paint dry.
Um, watch my dog
lick his balls.
Watch an
earthworm make its way across a sidewalk before a sneaker drops out of the
heavens, crushing its languid moving body.
21 is booooooooooooooooooring. Boring like
sitting through a briefing on a Friday afternoon. Boring like you are watching
Julia Child wipe herself.
Okay that may
actually be kind of fun.
Based on the
book, Bringing Down the House: The Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas
For Millions, (which
incidentally all 6 were Asian) this is basically an updated telling of Oliver
Twist. Here, the likable Jim Sturgess plays Oliver and evil, sardonic Kevin
Spacey is Fagin.
Ben Campbell
(Sturgess) is a shy, brilliant M.I.T. student who scores grades most of us only
dream of, hangs in bars with his nerd buddies Miles and Cam, and builds robots
for science project. Ben has also been accepted to Harvard Med…that only costs
$300,000. Ben’s part-time job at a haberdashery will help him reach his
$300,000 goal.
By the time he’s
60.
Needing to pay
for tuition, Ben is lured into an afterschool “math club” by his unorthodox
math professor, Micky Rosa (Spacey) and the seductive Jill Taylor, played by
Kate Bosworth (looking a little long in the tooth to play a college kid).
Micky convinces
Ben to join a group of the school’s most gifted kids and head to Vegas. To take
them for everything they got!
He plans, gives
them signals, fake ids and is there to collect the money in a posh suite. By
counting cards and employing an intricate system of signals, the team can beat
the casinos big time.
Seduced by the
money, the Vegas lifestyle, and Jill, innocent Ben begins to push the limits.
He’s not counting cards anymore. He’s gambling. Oh no!
Take a pause for
the dramatic music.
Though counting
cards isn't illegal, the stakes are high, and the challenge becomes not only
keeping the numbers straight, but staying one step ahead of the casinos'
menacing enforcer: Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne), not only hamming it up
but looking like he ate the entire ham.
Well after
suffering an hour or so through predictable scenes, snap zooms and dramatic
over-cranked slow motion…oh wait there is nothing on the flip side but
predictable scenes, snap zooms and dramatic over-cranked slow motion.
And a bad score!
Jim Sturgess is
certainly likable enough. He plays Ben’s innocence just enough to be believable.
But he does go over the top when he turns into evil Ben…who really isn’t that
evil after all. I did question Ben’s smarts by the way he stored his cash. But
if he didn’t store it where he did, we certainly wouldn’t have the obvious, see
this as clear as Pam Anderson’s tits, plot point.
But I won’t
blame Sturgess all the way. That I attribute to the pedestrian screenplay by
Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb.
Also, Ben’s
nerdy friends seem out of place here. I feel like they both walked off the set
of Superbad or The
Big Bang Theory for a
couple of scenes. Fishburne hams it up nicely. Must’ve been an easy week of
shooting for him. Damn, Morpheus has gotten big.
The best
performance here belongs to Spacey, who is, unfortunately, not in 21 enough. The movie slams to a boring halt
when he’s off-screen.
So if you really
want to see dramatic gambling I suggest you turn on the flat screen and watch Celebrity
Texas Hold’em. At least
if it gets boring you can switch channels or go make a sandwich.
One and a
half ball point pens.