Smart subject, dumb movie

Rating: 3/10 (2 November 2009)

Kevin Spacey, IMDb average score of 6,8 and a subject involving smarter-than-usual people doing some gambling mathematics sounds like a good movie. And was I fooled.
The story starts out fairly nice, Massachusetts and the university locations are nice to look at and the basic setup of using your special brain skills to make you rich is intriguing.
Only, little by little I noticed that all the interesting stuff is left to the minimum. Secret signs, the actual card counting and mathematics, fooling the cameras, face recognition. There was so much to play with, but the movie was basically all about loosing yourself to money and hi-life. Your regular "too much, too fast" story we get to read about up and coming film stars and musicians alike.
To me this just doesn't quite match up. At times it was like watching Britney Spears with an IQ of 160. Still, somehow, the story managed to be very predictable until maybe the very end.
I think the biggest let down here was, that I was actually looking forward to a smart movie that provokes some brain activity, but it was a simple popcorn movie afterall.