Critics around the country have slammed 21, and rightfully so. The film is pretentious as hell. It deviates from its non-fiction source, gets caught up in its own style and feels far longer than a two-hour movie should.
And I kinda liked it. I liked it quite a bit actually.
Perhaps it’s the very nature of counting cards that got me into this movie. It takes some really smart people to pull this off as well as these kids apparently did. Card counting in blackjack involves counting the values of the cards on the table in order to determine when a player has a probability advantage. Wikipedia defines the process as such:
“The principle behind counting cards in blackjack is that a deck of cards with a high proportion of high cards (tens and aces) to low cards is good for the player, while the reverse (a deck with a high proportion of low cards to high cards) is good for the dealer. A deck rich in 10s and aces improves the player’s odds because blackjacks (which offer a higher payout than other winning hands) become more common, the dealer is more likely to bust a stiff hand, and double-downs are more successful.”
Does the process sound complicated? Well, for Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), a 4.0 student from MIT who has just been accepted into Harvard Medical School, this stuff just comes with being a genius. The poor guy can’t afford the $300,000 tuition for med school, but his luck changes when his mathematical talents catch the eye of his math professor, Mickey Roca (Kevin Spacey). Roca leads an underground team of fellow MIT geniuses who travel to Las Vegas every weekend and count cards in blackjack. You need to be 21 to gamble, and Ben has just celebrated his 21st year of living. So, Ben and five of his fellow collegiates take the blackjack tables of Sin City by storm.
21 also happens to be the winning card value in blackjack, and the game is all about being slightly less than or equal to said number. These kids have signals and patterns indicating when and where it’s a good time to count the cards. 21 isn’t subtle, and as blackjack is not a spectator sport unless you’re counting, the movie uses its slick style to speed up the sequences to make them interesting. The scenes involving the playing of blackjack are dizzying feats of cinematographic indulgence.
21 goes on and on and on, and juggles between college sob story, slick card movie and cliché relationship melodrama. Ben and one of his teammates, Jill (Kate Bosworth), have a love affair. He gets so caught up in the game he forgets his old friends and their science project. He gets cocky and pushes his limits. And the stereotypic story dictates that eventually the whole shebang will collapse because of a crafty casino enforcer with a penchant for hitting people in the face (Lawrence Fishburne). Friends become enemies, enemies become friends and everyone will live happily ever after.
Essentially, director Robert Luketic treats 21 like the kid who wore a leather jacket in high school because he thought he was way more hip than he really was. The movie is silly when it should be smooth, sly when it should be subtle. And the tell for the ending is pretty clear well before it happens, as it’s a vastly simplified version of what happened in 2001’s Ocean’s Eleven.
Sturgess, Spacey and Fishburne give solid performances, and the only
weak link in the cast appears to be the very sexy, yet consistently
unreliable Bosworth. There are several shots where she is required to
be deep and thoughtful looking, and never quite rises to the occasion.
Luketic, director of Legally Blonde, has obvious skill behind the
camera, but could have used a stronger editor. 21’s biggest weakness is
its pacing. One less storyline wouldn’t have hurt this movie one bit.
It seems almost inexplicable to enjoy a movie that has this many
problems. Maybe its all the godawful crap I’ve seen in 2008 getting to
me. Next to that stuff, 21 is brilliant.
So is that what it takes to win me over? Certainly not, but I think my editor said something that sums up my point: “Being nice goes a long way.” The movie wasn’t great, but it certainly didn’t insult me either.
21 gave me things I like to see. I like watching Spacey be mean and tricky-like. I like watching the dude from the Matrix punch people. And I really like watching Bosworth get PG-13 naked. These are not especially good reasons to enjoy this movie, but I guess they’ll have to do.
So now that I’ve basically dug its grave (and perhaps my own), why did I like 21 so much? Because it was cool. It was really cool. This movie had the same hyper-reality that showed up in last year’s Smokin’ Aces, which received similar bashing treatment from critics. That movie was also a bit too cool for its own good. I also liked Smokin’ Aces.
I will lump 21 with films like Smokin’ Aces. These are movies I have no business enjoying, but appreciate anyway. This flick isn’t good, but I bet most people will like it.
Interesting side note: after watching 21, I had the unmistakable urge to go to class and study. All the hyper-intelligent people doing hyper-smart stuff in hyper-cool ways made me excited to learn. This was probably not the intention of the film, but that’s how I felt.