“21” needs to know when to hold 'em

Far less fascinating as an over-packaged, over-plotted thriller than it was as a nonfiction book, 21 is the sort of movie that inspires the question, "Why didn't they just make it into a documentary?" Certainly, the story of six MIT blackjack geeks who fleece Las Vegas would have been more informative and credible that way. Potentially more thrilling, too. Instead, director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) and screenwriters Peter Steinfeld (Analyze That) and Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) have turned Ben Mezrich's best-selling tell-all Bringing Down the House into a thing of rigid, joyless formula, with an off-the-rack protagonist – MIT math whiz Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess from Across the Universe) – who obediently places all the expected bets.

To wit: Ben, a brilliant but penniless undergrad, wonders where he will get $300,000 for Harvard medical school. Sure, he's a strong candidate for the program's full-ride scholarship, but even with his impeccable transcripts, it's an iffy proposition – especially when the scholarship chair lists "dazzle" as a prerequisite. Ben, with his five-dollar haircut and meek disposition, is decidedly dazzle-impaired.

And there, to borrow a poker term, is the nut. The filmmakers don't have much faith in Ben's tuition dilemma as motivation for the high-risk, high-reward temptation to follow, and why should they? He could always just take out a loan. The real issue here is his sex appeal, as insipidly illustrated when Ben – on his 21st birthday – longingly looks across the bar to where the cool kids are partying. Expensive clothes. Open-mouthed laughter. Girls who make out with each other.

And so: Ben is recruited by MIT's underground card-counting club, led by maverick math professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), and transforms himself into a sexy jet-setter. Never mind that his co-conspirators, including a model-hot blonde (Kate Bosworth) and a gay kleptomaniac (Aaron Yoo), look and act less like MIT math wonks than products of a Sony Pictures market-penetration survey.

By now, the "inspired by a true story" tag feels like lip service. (With audience demos in mind, the filmmakers changed the racial profile of the real-life scammers from predominantly Asian to predominantly white.) What's left? A hokey, over-long tale of wish fulfillment that tells us little to nothing about card-counting and features not one, but two great actors in embarrassing performances: Spacey as the Faustian carrot-dangler, and Laurence Fishburne as a sadistic casino enforcer. Maybe, the filmmakers forgot what any blackjack player learns the first time they bust: Sometimes, less is more.


21
Stars: Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne
Behind the scenes: Directed by Robert Luketic, from a script by Peter Steinfeld, Allan Loeb
Rated: PG-13 (some violence, and sexual content including partial nudity)
Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Grade: C-