Blackjack morality tale '21' doubles down on cynicism
Movie critics have their own way of counting cards. When characters in a Hollywood movie do something that feels true and freshly observed, the count goes +1. When they behave tritely, spout cliches, and generally act as if the screenwriters understand life only from other movies, we're -1. A lovemaking montage that dissolves from one gauzy, disembodied limb to another? -10.
By any fair count, "21" is -372, and that's a shame, since a lot of people were holding out high hopes for this one. Recent converts to the neo-Vegas gambling craze craved the buzz they get from drawing a skeet flush. Readers of the film's nonfiction source, Ben Mezrich's "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions," wanted the book's grubby little details. Fans of British actor Jim Sturgess hoped the dreamy "Across the Universe" star would ascend to the next rung of fame. MIT alums looked forward to seeing their campus on screen.
Me, I just wanted a decent card movie, and it didn't even have to be as good as "Rounders."
But everyone gets dealt a stiff hand in this bust from director Robert Luketic ("Legally Blonde," "Monster-in-Law") and writers Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb. "21" spins a hackneyed, shallow morality tale about the rise and fall of a young Boston innocent named Ben Campbell (Sturgess, tripping awkwardly over a generic American accent), an MIT undergrad who's desperate to come up with the tuition for Harvard Med.
Building a competition-winning robocar with his nerd friends (Josh Gad and Sam Golzari) won't do the trick, but then Ben, a born numbers adept, is invited to join a secret campus blackjack club led by a Mephistophelean professor played by Kevin Spacey. That's right, ham's on the menu at the MIT cafeteria.
If only there were more of it. Pleasant in a watery sort of way, Sturgess evinces little of the feckless charm he showed in "Universe." Worse, his chemistry with Kate Bosworth, as a beauteous, blond fellow member of the card-counting club, is less than zero. The team members meet by night, test their strategy in underground Chinatown gambling dens - does Governor Patrick know about this? - and fly to Vegas on the weekends for delirious jags of running the numbers and the winnings up.
As with all morality tales, we're shown the benefits of high-rolling - the clothes! the luxury suites! the soft-focus sex! - and then solemnly informed it's bad for us. Ben's head swells and lessons must be learned. Gunning for the students and their mentor is Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne), an old-school Vegas security chief with an even older school name. Perversely, "21" gives Fishburne and Spacey, two of our most enjoyably overripe thespians, only one scene together.
But wait - there's more. Disappointment No. 1: The details of card-counting are skimped. A classroom example is trotted out early in the film - the old game-show probability paradox - but it's not explained very well and the scenes at the blackjack tables don't clear it up. Maybe the gambling industry has a stake in this movie? Maybe the filmmakers just think we're stupid?
Disappointment No. 2: Ethnics go to the back of the bus. The name of the hero of Mezrich's nonfiction bestseller, "Kevin Lewis," was an alias for student Jeff Ma; the real MIT team was primarily Asian-American. "21" waves the wand and turns them into three Anglos, one idiot klepto Korean-American (Aaron Yoo), and Kianna (Liza Lapira), a mixed-race woman who seems far and away the smartest person here.
Disappointment No. 3: MIT looks suspiciously like Boston University. Wait, it is Boston University. Not a deal breaker, but indicative of the movie's lack of interest in local realism, despite appearances by the South Street Diner and a corner in Chucktown. Any film that begins with a shot of a racing shell on the Charles is off to a bad start.
Disappointment No. 4: Spacey phones it in. Often entertainingly, and you grasp at his heavy-lidded sarcasm as though it were a life raft, but this isn't a real movie and he knows it. Vapid and over-edited, "21" is a studio concoction that doesn't even have the courage of its own cynicism. By the time the end credits roll around, you realize nothing's actually been risked. It's the gambling equivalent of Go Fish.
The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 