STUDIO: Sony
RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2008
STARRING: Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Jack McGee, and Laurence Fishburne
WRITTEN BY: Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loe
DIRECTED BY: Robert Luketic
GENRE: Drama
RATING: PG-13

Robert Luketic and writers Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loe have taken Ben Mezrich's great nonfiction, based-on-a-true-story book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, mixed up some of the details, and slapped it down at the cinematic craps table, hoping that they could turn Mezrich's examination of the allure and underbelly of Vegas into a straight-up thriller. The question is - did the gamble pay off? Is 21 the big winner at the table? Even for people unfamiliar with the source material, there's no way 21 will be a straight-up blackjack. No, 21 is a movie that starts strong enough, maybe a 16 against a dealer 7, but, by the final act, it has totally busted out. Like a lot of Vegas trips, everything seems great when the plane touches down, but, before you know it, your pockets are empty, your head hurts, and you're really tired of the bright lights and the incessant beeping of the slot machines.

Jim Sturgess stars in 21 as Ben Campbell, a character loosely based on the real Jeff Ma, who went by Kevin Lewis in the Mezrich book. Ben goes to M.I.T. and struggles with a common problem - having all the brains to get somewhere in the world and none of the money to take him there. Campbell wants to go to Harvard Law School and has the grades and extra-curriculars to get in, but he needs a hard-to-get scholarship to be able to afford it. Or does he? Turns out Ben is an "easy mark" for Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), a morally corrupt professor who also happens to run a group of students in a card-counting ring. Before you can say "double down", Ben is flying out to Vegas with some of his smartest classmates and working an elaborate plan to count cards and make some fat cash. Of course, there's a beautiful blonde (Kate Bosworth) to keep Ben tied to the group when his conscious starts to get the best of him and, of course, there are some old friends that Ben leaves behind for his new glittery life as a card shark.

The big problem with 21 lies right there in that "of course", that sense that, even after my brief description, it kind of already feels like you've seen this movie before, doesn't it? If you've never been to Vegas and you've never sat at a blackjack table and gambled more than you reasonably should, what you're missing out on is that sensation of the unpredictable. Not only do you not know what face-down card the dealer is working with, but you don't know what card you'll get next or even what the guy next to you is going to do that might affect the entire game. The thrill of gambling is all about unpredictability, and 21 doesn't contain a single scene that you couldn't close your eyes and write right now in your head after reading the plot's four-sentence description.

The only thing that slightly redeems 21 is that it's a well-made movie that does get some of the glitz and charm of Vegas down. The shot that feels most believable comes early in the film as Ben looks out over the Strip as his plane lands in Vegas for the first time. Anyone who's been to Vegas can identify with that feeling - that giddy sense that anything is possible. The fatal flaw of 21 is that, instead of recreating that feeling of unpredictability on film, Luketic and his team took a book that dissected a part of the gambling community that most people will never see and made a predictable tale of an everyman caught in a dangerous situation. Jeff Ma was not an everyman. He led a life that most of us will never remotely approach. So why make a movie about his life that feels so by-the-numbers?