On Screen
21
BY Adam Nayman March 26, 2008 14:03
Adapted from a fact-based novel by Ben Mezrich, 21 limps through the rise-and-fall structure endemic to most gambling dramas. The main riser-faller is MIT math whiz Ben (Jim Sturgess), whose Harvard-Man aspirations quail in the face of the school’s tuition fees. Such are his motives for hooking up with professor Rosa (Kevin Spacey), who organizes card-counting field trips to the blackjack tables of Las Vegas — although the fact that his new partner in crime (Kate Bosworth) happens to be the high-IQ hottie of his dreams doesn’t exactly hurt. Using Rosa’s system, Ben and his accomplices fleece a string of casinos, incurring the wrath of a brutal loss-preventions specialist (Laurence Fishburne) — and setting off a series of internecine betrayals.
21 assumes that the spectacle of smart people doing dumb things will be inherently compelling, but the story doesn’t have any juice. Director Robert Luketic attempts a high-rolling style, but his relentless flourishes are off-putting, and so is the underlying amorality of the script, which rationalizes and then rewards Ben’s cheating.
Objectionable ethics aside, there’s just not a lot of pleasure to be gleaned here; not from the dead-obvious plotting and certainly not from the performances (Spacey’s snarky shark act grows more depressing by the year). And the one good visual joke, in which the famed Bellagio fountains cut out like lawn sprinklers on the fritz in the midst of a sex scene, feels like a happy accident of camera placement — the movie around it is so lazy that I refuse to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt.
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