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'21': A Few Cards Short

By Daniel Montgomery

Friday, March 28, 2008

Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne) is bad-ass. How do we know he’s bad-ass? Because he smokes in a non-smoking building, and when he puts out his cigarette, it’s in slow-motion! Actually, everything in ‘21’ seems to have been shot in slow-motion. That combined with the excessive inserts and sound effects — cards hit the Blackjack table with a heavy, sledgehammer-like THWOMP — add up to director Robert Luketic (‘Legally Blonde’) trying too hard. His whole movie wants to be bad-ass, but resorting to these superficial flourishes is kind of like using jazz hands to spice up your dance recital.

Based on the true story of six M.I.T. students who took Vegas for millions by counting cards, ‘21’ stars Jim Sturgess as college whiz kid Ben Campbell, who can’t afford the $300,000 cost of Harvard Medical School — think ‘Will Hunting’ without the abandonment issues. He applies for a full-ride scholarship, but is told he doesn’t have a life story impressive enough to distinguish him. A professor explains that the previous winner was a Korean immigrant with one leg; “Can you cut off one of your legs?” he suggests. I think he’s only half-kidding.

Ben can kill two birds with one stone: join the card-counting team, cash in, pay for college, and have a story to tell. He’s recruited in the strangest way. One of the team members approaches him while studying and instructs him to follow. Now, most of us in the viewing audience, if approached by a stranger in an empty building and asked to follow him to parts unknown, would not only not follow but start reaching for the pepper spray. Ben might be a genius, but he isn’t too bright.

But I digress. Ben is taken to the inner sanctum of card-counters, led by Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) and including among its members the prettiest girl in school, Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). Our early impressions are that Mickey comes off too much as a heavy and Jill too much as a femme fatale. They seem like academic poseurs, putting on the airs of character types they’ve seen in film noir and David Mamet movies.

But the real problem with ‘21’ is that it takes itself too seriously. Steven Soderbergh had the right idea with ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, which exploited its high-stakes maneuvers, outsize characters, and hopelessly contrived machinations for all the giddy fun that could be wrought from them. Here, the screenplay weighs down the scheming with an all-too-predictable moral story about Ben; wouldn’t you know it, the good kid starts to like his new lifestyle a little too much, gets greedy, falls from grace, learns life lessons, and so on, and so on. Even when it tries to pull the wool over our eyes at the last minute, we can see it coming from a mile away. There are no surprises here; we know where this train is headed before it even leaves the station.

I kept waiting for the film to break out, to cut loose, to have fun with itself, but it never does. I imagine an alternate story cast with the same actors and characters, but with a different tone. Instead of the dreary arc about Ben’s dilemma, how about letting the kids be kids. Let the actors run amok with their costumes and personas, play whimsically at being junior con artists. Let them be self-aware, and provide adult characters who undercut them with humor when they act too big for their britches, instead of Micky Rosa, who plays like a mob boss transplanted into a mathematics classroom. And Cole Williams, a grizzled casino security expert, seems to have come from another movie entirely; Fishburne plays it straight, like he really is in a Mamet heist picture, but these are kid’s-table characters in a wannabe-high-roller story.

A better film would also include a more extensive explanation of the card-counting scheme. We watch the characters study, signal each other to join hot tables, and then we cut to those inserts of cards being dealt with dramatic noises on the soundtrack. This, I suppose, is to compensate for a lack of urgency in the game-play and a lack of clarity about the technique. How much more fun it would be for the audience to get to play along and become part of the scheme.

As for the slow-motion, well, if somebody offered you a slo-mo strut through a Vegas casino in a major motion picture, I don’t think you’d turn it down. I know I wouldn’t. But you and I would probably enjoy it more than any of the characters in this movie do.