As long as you don't think about it too hard you'll probably walk out of
21 feeling like you've just watched a very smart film. And why not? It's a film about people doing math to win stacks of cash at blackjack. Gotta be smart to do that, right? Well, sure. And the real people who actually did this - MIT students, the lot of them - certainly were a fairly sharp bunch. But if you stop and think about it at all you'll pretty quickly realize that despite slinging a bunch of numbers around
21 isn't actually about gambling at all, nor about being smart, but rather just a solid piece of fantasy escapism. Yes, kids, you too can be young and attractive, get Kate Bosworth into bed despite being socially awkward, and make mountains of cash. You want a real gambling movie? Go rent
Rounders. That thing kicks all sorts of ass and is just criminally underseen. For a decent night's entertainment, though,
21 is not a half bad option at all.
The skinny, just in case you missed the ubiquitous ad campaigns: Jim Sturgess plays Ben Campbell, a real life big-brain type who was riding a 4.0 GPA at MIT when approached by a professor (Kevin Spacey) to join a group of students he's training to count cards and win at blackjack. Campbell agrees to join up only because he needs a mountain of cash to attend Harvard Medical School and away we go on the rise and crash cycle we've seen in stacks of films before.
People keep doing the whole 'pride comes before the fall' thing for a simple reason, though, that being when done well it still works really, really well. And
21 does it quite well. Sturgess himself is kind of forgettable, a sort of bland everyman who falls somewhere in the nether region between Tobey Maguire and Jim Caviezel, but he's surrounded by a very strong supporting cast that raises the bar considerably. Spacey turns in the best performance he's given in years, playing the sort of morally vacant character that made us love him in the first place, while Laurence Fishburne is similarly strong as an old school Vegas security goon seeing his living slowly slip away as computer systems and biometrics quickly squeeze out the last of his kind. The comic relief is genuinely funny and - let's be honest - there are worse ways to spend an evening than by looking at Kate Bosworth.
On the downside,
21 has the same problem that plagues most true-story films in that anyone who's paid any attention at all over the past couple months already knows exactly how it ends. This robs the film of a lot of tension, and it's hard to feel any sort of underdog enthusiasm for a lead character who you know is going to have his entire life handed to him thanks to his great big brain - a fact the film actually explicitly points out.
In quasi-related news, if you're a Toronto boy or girl, the new AMC Theater at Yonge and Dundas gets a thumbs up from the Tattooed Man. Very comfortable with excellent screens and seating with none of the gaudy flash and noise that plagues Silver City theaters. Easier to get to than the former Paramount, too.