Watch the trailer for "21"
21
If you couldn’t get into the Oceans Eleven movies because of all the old guys in the cast (“Brad Pitt? Yeah, maybe if I’m taking my mom!”), you are the target audience for 21, a movie that has as much impact on the screen as its title does on the page. Based on the true story of some MIT math geniuses who put their skills to work beating the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, it is pitched to viewers who are the same age but considerably lower in IQ than its characters. British actor Jim Sturgess (now zero for two after
Across the Universe) has the lead role of Ben, the team’s newest recruit. A straight arrow worried about how he’ll be able to afford the tuition at Harvard Medical School on a part-time job that pays $8 an hour, he initially demurs the offer from team organizer Kevin Spacey, an MIT math professor who spots his ability to do mental gymnastics. But in what is only the first dip of the toe into an endless stream of lazy plotting, he agrees to join at the behest of fellow player Kate Bosworth. The plot arc is inevitable: We know they’ll win a lot of money, get busted or betrayed, and stir themselves for a rousing finale. That doesn’t mean that the story can’t entertain us with fantasies of hungry kids living large along the way. Yet somehow director Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law), admittedly working from a thin script, misses or mishandles every interesting possibility offered by the story. Ben narrates the thrill of being able to reinvent himself in Vegas, but all we see of them enjoying the perks offered to high rollers is confined to a quick montage. The sexual tension between Sturgess and Bosworth is so lacking that when they hit the sheets I was certain it would turn out that Spacey was using her to keep his star player in line. (Not so.) A lot of time is devoted to detailing their blackjack system, which is nonetheless incomprehensible. And the supposedly cunning team strategy to dodge casino security is laughably filled with holes. (One example: They know they’re being watched by security cameras, yet they never change the hand signals they use to communicate with each other week after week.) Laurence Fishburne is wasted in an initially promising role as the casino security guy whose job is being taken over by facial recognition computers, and it’s simply embarrassing watching Spacey trying to act his way through his cardboard part.
21 is a movie that thinks so little of its audience that it accepted product placement money from Budweiser to show Boston college students spending their weekends drinking Bud Light. As if.
—m. faust
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