My theory as to why I found the movie 21 to be less than satisfying is that, unlike the characters in the movie, I don't have a genius level IQ. If I did, maybe some of the actions that I found to be incredibly stupid would have made sense to me. The movie is about a math whiz that joins a group of organized card counters who rip off Vegas casinos. The math whiz, Ben, says he's only doing this to raise the $300,000 it will take to go to Harvard Medical School. A fine example of what seem to me to be the actions of brain damage cases is that, when Ben starts raking in the cash, he decides to hide it above the ceiling tiles in his MIT dorm room. Me, I'd have put it into a safe deposit box so that anyone who got mad at me and decided to ransack my room wouldn't find $300,000 in cash and walk off with it but hey, what do I know?
Ben is played by Jim Sturgess whom we last saw in Across The Universe where he played a jerk who nailed a hot blond while traveling across the country, lost her because he was a jerk but managed to get her back through a serious of unlikely events. In this movie he stretches as an actor by playing a jerk who nails a hot blond while traveling across the country and loses her because he's a jerk. Does he get her back through a series of unlikely events? That would be telling. The hot blond is Jill, played by Kate Bosworth, best known as the girl who was so wildly miscast as Lois Lane in Superman Returns that the casting director of that movie was covered in honey and cast into a pit of hungry army ants. At least I assume he was. She's better here because she's a decent actress when she's not playing women who don't recognize their boyfriends just because they put on a pair of glasses. Kate's Superman co-star Kevin Spacey plays Mickey Rosa, the MIT math professor who recruits Ben to join his group of card counters.
For a while, all is well. Ben has an absolutely swell time ripping off casinos and having sex with Jill until the thing that everyone in the audience knew would happen happens.
Mickey warns Ben to be cool at all times, to only bet big when the odds favor it and to follow instructions when told to stop playing and leave the table. This all seems fairly straightforward to me but, again, I'm not a genius so I'm sure Ben has very good reasons when he eventually decides to ignore all that good advice and gamble away a shitload of money. This causes Mickey to get very angry and vow revenge and also causes us to see the dark and diabolical side of Mickey that had been foreshadowed all through the movie. It also puts Ben into the path of a thuggish casino security official played by Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne seems to believe that Ben is The One who was destined to come and completely clean out his casino. Unfortunately for Ben, instead of elevating The One to an exalted position of respect and leadership, he deals with him like he does with all casino cheats, namely with severe beatings.
So, there's poor Ben, over his head, friendless and broke. Luckily, he's in a movie which means he can come up with a crazy scheme that depends on flawless precision coupled with a great deal of luck and it'll actually have an excellent chance of fixing his jam, getting back his girl and retrieving his money. I'm not saying that this is what will happen, but, again, this is a movie so you know the odds that this will be the case are pretty good. It's not horrible and sometimes approaches being a decent movie but always gets pulled back from that by the predictability of its plot and the stupidity of its genius characters. So, when wondering if you should bet the price of a ticket on 21, you should just say, "Check."
Yeah, I know, the last joke sucked. Sue me.
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