Running time: 122 mins. Drama. Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey,
Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts.
Director: Robert Luketic.
DATING back to 17th
century France, blackjack is a deceptively simple game of luck and
skill that remains a firm favourite with gamblers.
The rules
are simple: take successive hits from the deck, against other players
and the dealer, to accumulate the highest scoring hand without
exceeding 21 points.
Naturally, the odds are stacked heavily
in favour of the house... unless you attempt to count cards to assess
the likely probability of drawing a winning hand.
Adapted
from Ben Mezrich's fascinating book Bringing Down The House: The Inside
Story Of Six M.I.T Students Who Took Vegas For Millions, Robert
Luketic's new film is a high stakes drama about a group of academically
gifted youngsters who risk everything in the gambling capital of the
world.
Unlike its risk-taking protagonists, 21 plays safe at
every turn, sticking with two-dimensional characters whose emotional
journey is far too linear, then going bust with an obvious double-bluff
that we can see coming well before the hapless fall guy.
The
hero of this lack lustre yarn is Ben Campbell (Sturgess), one of the
most gifted seniors at M.I.T, who has been accepted to Harvard Medical
School and now needs US300,000 dollars for the tuition.
A
chance to raise the cash presents itself when sexy classmate Jill
(Bosworth) recruits him to a hush-hush club run by mathematics
professor Micky Rosa (Spacey).
The teacher hopes to teach
Ben how to beat the odds at blackjack and outwit old school security
chief Cole Williams (Fishburne).
"Are you talking about counting cards?" asks Ben.
"No, I'm talking about getting very, very rich," replies Micky slyly.
Ben
joins Jill, Choi (Yoo), Kianna (Lapira) and cocksure Fisher (Pitts) in
the card counting ring, learning a system of subtle signals to ensure
they never get caught by Cole or the omnipresent CCTV cameras.
Armed
with the necessary skills, the youngsters head for the Nevada desert
determined to impress Micky but the adrenaline rush of winning big
gradually corrupts their souls.
21 lays its cards on the
table from the opening frame, and Luketic's sluggish direction does
little to alleviate the nagging feeling that we know all of the aces up
the film's sleeve well before screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan
Loeb deal them.
Sturgess is a likeable leading man and there
is some semblance of an emotional arc as his hero metamorphoses from
shy, demure mummy's boy into designer-label clad poseur.
However,
the other students remain enigmas - they have no back-story and there
is never any explanation of their motives for joining Micky's club -
and the romance between Ben and Jill is tepid and crudely engineered.
Consequently,
Bosworth and her young co-stars are wasted in two-dimensional roles,
Fishburne glowers in his few scenes and Spacey dusts off another
backstabbing scoundrel from the repertoire. | 
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