21 (***1/4)

Movies like the The Cooler or Two for the Money can make it seem like success in gambling is all about good vibes. With a game like poker, that can be partially (sort of) true; success there can depend on understanding your opponent as well as the cards. Maybe that’s why there are more movies about poker than blackjack, where emotion of any sort is an enemy. Even more than Bringing Down the House, the non-fiction best-seller by Ben Mezrich on which it’s based, 21 reminds us of that. The heroes of this movie are MIT brainiacs who can add and subtract fast, the primary skill necessary to count cards. Led by a professor, played to smug perfection by Kevin Spacey, the MIT team employed an old-fashioned technique in a new way so as to maximize returns and minimize risk.

This movie version is very loosely adapted, with a wholly invented main character (Jim Sturgess), a college kid trying to get a scholarship, and a perfunctory love interest (Kate Bosworth). But it does present the essence of the techniques that the team used to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in does so in a way that makes blackjack seem as exciting as poker. Director Robert Luketic effectively uses quick edits and on-screen graphics; you might not exactly be able to go count cards after you watch the movie, but you’ll understand the principles as well as the system of team playing that raised the profitability. The script tidies up the book’s elaborations of the many techniques the team used to avoid getting caught. You’ll probably wonder why the team keeps going back to Vegas when they know the casinos there are looking for them. The answer appears to be that it simplifies some things for the screenwriters—in reality the gamblers played it safer by mixing up their destinations. Laurence Fishburne’s professional cheater spotter is somewhere between a composite character and a fiction, but the neat (almost completely made up) ending is certainly clever.

If you like the movie, I recommend the book even more highly, but both of them are safer bets than a night at the casino.

IMDB link

viewed 3/5/08; reviewed 4/1/08