FilmEdge.net reviews 21

In 1979, the first card-counting team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology went to Atlantic City to beat the house, failed miserably, and disbanded after graduation.  Despite this failure, two members of this team regrouped, recruited two new members, and the MIT Blackjack Team was born.  The new film 21 tells a heavily fictionalized tale of the group as they spend weekends raking in winnings with a legal, complicated card-counting system in Las Vegas in 1994. The story centers on MIT senior Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), a brilliant, likeable young man who carries a 4.0 grade-point average, works at a haberdashery, and designs robots for fun.  Ben has been accepted to Harvard Medical School, but cannot afford the $300,000 tuition there.  He applies for a prestigious full scholarship, but is told by the scholarship committee that the winner will need more than a stellar academic record to garner the prize.  The final selection hinges on an essay about life experience.  “Dazzle me,” the scholarship chairman tells Ben.  Unfortunately, Ben is not the dazzling sort.  But he does have a brilliant mathematical mind, and Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) knows that he’ll be a perfect addition to his blackjack team.  With a little help from a beautiful blonde rocket scientist Jill Taylor (a badly miscast Kate Bosworth), Ben is recruited and trained, and then heads off to Vegas to make enough money to pay his medical school tuition.  The plan is successful, but the team does not realize that despite their disguises and amazingly intricate plans to keep a low profile, they have come to the attention of a veteran casino security expert, Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne) who intends to ban them from his clients’ casino floors.

Sounds like the setup for a great cat-and-mouse game, doesn’t it?  The story is interesting, the casino action is swift, the characters are all intriguing.  There’s tension, suspense, romance, strong relationships and piles of money.  Director Robert Luketic has all the components of a great story but he just cannot seem to do anything to pull them together into a cohesive whole.  The plot moves forward in fits and starts.  Characters do odd things at odd times for no apparent reasons.  Great potential scenes-on-film are discarded in favor of voice-overs.  The considerable dramatic skills of Spacey and Fishburne are stretched all the way from one to two.  Spacey spends nearly all of his time onscreen looking rather smug, and Fishburne does a lot of growling.  This does not make for great dramatic performance.
 
True stories can be the basis for wonderful films.  Amazing things happen to people every day, and this is certainly an amazing story in its own right.  Luketic does more than take some dramatic license.  He seems to feel that he must add what he believes moviegoers expect:  some good old-fashioned beatings (administered in the ages-old cliché of a barren basement boiler room complete with single light bulb), scantily-clad exotic dancers, and a chase scene.  Unfortunately, we’ve seen the thumping a dozen times before in a dozen old gangster films, the exotic dancers only aren’t that exotic and add nothing to the film but a gratuitous flash of skin, and the chase scene is on foot through a casino kitchen.  21 seems cobbled together from any number of other movies about the dark side of Vegas, and all the seams are showing.  It’s OCEAN'S 11 without charm and CASINO without organized crime.

Oddly, what Luketic gets right are the details.  We see little of the sin in Sin City.  The director knows that vice isn’t the point here—the blackjack team is a business without time or patience for overindulgence.  The supporting cast is terrific.  Look for newcomers Aaron Yoo as Choi and Jack Gilpin as Phillips, both blackjack-team members, and Josh Gad as Ben’s best friend Miles.  Luketic’s deft visual comparison of the imposing gray marble of MIT and the nearly overwhelming glitz of the Las Vegas strip is stunning.  Las Vegas itself is a character in the film, and we see her in all her gaudy glory as high-tech biometric security edges out old-school casino spotters, changing the gaming industry forever.

There is a bit of controversy attached to 21.  The real-life MIT Blackjack Team was almost exclusively comprised of students and professors of Asian heritage.  The film was cast with mostly Caucasian actors.  There has been some criticism in the Asian cultural community about this.  But the film strays so far from the history of the real team that I am not sure this is a valid issue.  While it is true that the premise of the film is based in reality, the events are all fictional.  It might be more of a disservice to recreate the ethnic makeup of the historical team since the screenwriters seem to have dispensed with history altogether.