I usually get a good feeling from the glamour of Las Vegas even when it’s on screen. I’ve only been to Vegas once as of this writing and it was only for one evening, but the place is incredible. The amount of people all doing the same thing as me, the sounds, the lights, the buildings. Even if you don’t gamble, it’s a great place to visit. The Oceans movies are great to watch not only for the intricate & engaging plotting and top notch acting by some of the best screen actors in the business, but the Vegas setting is just awesome to invest your attention in. 21 gave me this same feeling at times, I enjoyed watching it mainly due to it being set in Vegas for the majority of the movie, but that wasn’t quite enough to put this movie up there for recommendation.
I will be honest and say a lot of my friends had seen this movie before me and I’ve asked multiple people what they thought of it and I got a negative response each time. This flick was full on snubbed by everyone I know that has seen it. But you know, I wouldn’t go that far. It was alright, I enjoyed watching it but I don’t think I will ever watch it again. For me the basis of the plot outline is every reason to watch it. A group of college kids figure out a black jack counting system and go to Vegas to semi-legally rob casinos of their money. That idea alone could make for some pretty tense scenes and mind blowing feats of memory and concentration that could give our characters some sort of elite being status.
The movie starts to go into the details but it doesn’t reveal enough. The counting system is outlined but never really explained. I knew what they were doing but I couldn’t work out how they were winning so much based on what they were doing. I don’t think this became a real problem cause the film doesn’t spend too much time on the card counting, it’s not what the film is really about. Sure enough there are plenty of scenes with the players sitting at the black jack table scheming away, but the card counting is merely a tool around which to create some typical drama around the subjects of love, friendship and loyalty which pretty much all takes place away from the black jack table, and away from Vegas.
Our main character Ben (Jim Sturgess – 50 dead men walking) is a math genius who is introduced to a group of card counters by his “Vegas card counting veteran” math teacher, Kevin Spacey. Ben needs money to go to Harvard med school, something like three hundred thousand dollars, so this is his reason for getting involved. He has a team of spotters who play the tables and they all use hand signals to let him know when a table is “hot” and it’s time to hustle, or whatever they call it.
So the system, I had to quickly look this up online just to figure out what they did with these numbers. Basically it is called a HiLo system or something to that effect, and what they do is count cards by giving (as they come into play) low cards a +1, high cards a -1, and medium value cards a 0. Therefore when you get a table as high as +15 for example, it means there are a lot of high cards left in the deck so the spotters signal over the counters and use a code word to let the counter know where to start counting from. The system isn’t designed to win every hand, but to increase the chances of winning with large bets once they have a fair amount of certainty there are a lot of high cards left in the deck.
From what I have read, the system is very basic and I cannot criticize or praise anything the film does as far as the counting system goes, although I did read that the table values they were getting up to (+15, +16) are extremely rare.
They win plenty money, Ben has achieved his goal of making enough to pay for med school. He gets into the lavish high rolling lifestyle which starts to have adverse effects on his real life back in Boston. His friends notice he’s neglecting them, he’s falling in love with another of his team members Jill (Kate Bosworth), and he gets too emotional and starts to make mistakes. This causes a rift between him and Spacey, who pretty much rules the team but doesn’t get involved anymore, he takes a 50% cut of everything they win. It was just a matter of time before things start to go wrong, or they get caught.
This movie is really about Ben and an eventful chapter in his life. It’s a short one and you aren’t really given the time to get behind the characters and the team. The character development was brief and heavily one-sided, there were at least 3 characters that had mucho screen time in this flick and I didn’t know a thing about them, the camaraderie could have been built more progressively rather than a barrage of information allowing multiple characters to be built up in a shorter time, but the film makers opted for neither of these approaches. What this movie really lacked was tension or any kind of excitement. Laurence Fishburne is the Antagonist, he’s the casino owner on their case that beats up card counters in the casino basement if they get caught, but that’s all he does, he punches them a few times, tells them to stop counting, and lets them go. So even if Ben or the team get caught, a few hundred thousand dollars is definitely worth a couple pops on the noggin.
There is a twist, but I didn’t buy it. It was hidden from the audience and by no means could it be considered good plotting. I won’t say what it was, but don’t expect anything too clever.
21 was an adaptation of a novel called ‘bringing down the house’ which is a crap name for a film so I’m glad they changed it. I think a creative team is definitely limited when adapting a novel especially when (if the film is anything to go by) the source material isn’t particularly inspiring.
Had it been original, I would have loved to see a movie of this particular subject matter go into the technical details with the scamming the casinos and card counting business. For one thing, it could have created way more tension at the black jack table, it could’ve been a slow burner that makes the audience feel clever by understanding the system and the risks involved. But tension, the threat of getting caught were none existent, and is replaced with the prospect of Ben not graduating and never making it to med school. Sweet, but not sweet enough.
