Boston Good, Vegas Great
21 accelerates when action hits the casinos

Whenever a screenwriter is adapting a blockbuster novel into a feature film, there’s always the danger that the dialogue will get in the way of the action. The result is a movie where the characters are explaining the story with their dialogue instead of showing the story with their actions.

Such is the case with the new movie 21, based on Ben Mezrich’s best-selling memoir Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Although the story is a riveting look at card-counting whiz kids who risk their lives for money at casino blackjack tables, much of it is told with the all the drudgery of an 8 a.m. statistics class.

21 (a name so much inferior to Bringing Down the House that one wonders why they changed it) stars Jim Sturgess as Ben Campbell, a M.I.T. wunderkind trying to raise $300,000 to attend medical school at Harvard. One of his math professors, Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) recruits him into an elite group of students that he flies to Las Vegas on weekends to use his card-counting techniques at the blackjack tables. Although desperate for funds, he is reluctant to join the group until comely fellow student Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth) uses her feminine charm to basically dare him into the group.

The rest of the blackjack group features students Choi (Aaron Yoo), Kianna (Liza Lapira) and Fisher (Jacob Pitts). To join the group and fly to Vegas on weekends, Ben must alienate his best friends at M.I.T., Miles (Josh Gad) and Cam (Sam Golzari), and abandon their science project.

The first half of 21 sputters along as we meet all of the characters and learn how the group is going to achieve its no-lose blackjack plan. While Sturgess, Bosworth and the others do a fine job bringing their characters to life, too much of the early part of the film tries to explain the card-counting procedure, a method that would be better left a mystery.

The film really starts to fly, however, when the group puts its plan into action in the casinos of Las Vegas. Watching Ben’s first introduction to the city, the audience is swept away in a sea of neon and showgirl sequins. When he finally makes his way to a blackjack table we watch as he takes his first addictive high-stakes hand, we root for him with an all-too-real sense of dread.

That dread materializes in the form of Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne), a casino security specialist whose line of work has been threatened by facial recognition software that many casinos are turning to. Intent on showing the industry that he can do much more than a computer can when it comes to recognizing cheaters, Cole zeroes in on Ben and his M.I.T. gang’s weekend trips to Vegas.

As a heavy menacing force, Fishburne gets the MVP award in 21 for taking the exciting casino action and turning it into a matter of life and death.

21 is a movie that gets a lot of mileage from that old “based on a true story” tag. Knowing that it is a piece of non-fiction, the audience gives the movie some leeway that it might hold back from a piece of fiction. Despite that, there are some serious questions that arise from this supposedly true story. How could a professor fly to Vegas with five of his students every weekend without arousing any suspicion at M.I.T.? Why would a super-genius such as Ben Campbell hide his cash in such a stupid place? When the group was in danger in Las Vegas, why didn’t they ever consider the much closer Atlantic City?

The biggest drawback to 21 is the unrealistic love story between Jill and Ben. It makes little sense, doesn’t add to the story, and there is little if any chemistry between Sturgess and Bosworth.

In conclusion, 21 is a nice little diversion of a film, especially when the action gets going in Las Vegas. If director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) had taken more poetic license with Mezrich’s book, he might have ended up with a more interesting, action packed film.

21 is rated PG-13 for some violence, and sexual content including partial nudity. It is currently playing at Regal Cinema in Boone.