Just another teenage action/romance movie

Rating: 5/10 (17 May 2009)

I know there are pages and pages of reviews already but I just had to write something or bust after wasting my time watching this movie.
The film has really nothing to do with being a blackjack counter; it uses the Las Vegas casinos and the premise of card-counting only as a vehicle for a teenage action/romance story.
The script is full of contradictions. The most beautiful girl on the campus of M.I.T. is supposedly a rocket scientist. We know this only because one of the nerds says she is; she never utters a word or gives us a clue about the scope of her intelligence or her field of expertise.
A college math professor, who becomes the organizer of a blackjack card-counting team, mentions more than once that this is a business and that emotions should be kept out of it, yet once the team starts showing a profit they go crazy-wild, spending exorbitant amounts of money going to boutiques and topless bars.
He tells them "When we get to the casino we don't know each other and we'll wear disguises" yet only one girl "disguises" herself with a wig once in a while; the rest of them don't do a thing to change their appearance.
For five people who are supposed to be strangers they spend an awful lot of time watching each other intently at the gaming tables and partying and shopping together; the only time they keep their distance from one another is back on campus where they strangely don't interact at all.
They're supposed to stay under the radar and not draw attention to themselves but they play at the same casino every weekend and within a few weeks the main character goes from being a shy college kid to the biggest whale Vegas has ever seen, and is on a first-name basis with every dealer, pit boss, and valet in the joint.
And for someone who doesn't want to draw attention to himself and his team, a 50-ish professor shouldn't be caught hanging around with a bunch of 20-ish kids, especially not in a titty bar.
As for the card-counting, I found it to be slightly unrealistic to say the least. A count of +10 is a counter's dream; to consistently find counts of +15 and above at every table is ridiculous. Not to mention that pit bosses are competent counters themselves and any one of them would order a change of decks in a New York minute if they saw the count staying that high for that long. Oh yeah, another thing about counting cards ... a high count is favorable to the players because it means they might get more 19s and 20s, but the dealer stands the same chance of getting those 19s and 20s so a high count doesn't necessarily guarantee a win on every hand.
I found myself wondering how a college kid could fly to Vegas every weekend without his mother, who obviously kept in close contact with him, calling the police and filing a missing person's report. The kid's friends ask why he doesn't return their phone calls but they never think there's anything odd about the fact that it's only between Friday and Sunday that he can't be reached.
What I found really confusing was the time frame. The original M.I.T. team worked the casinos in the 1970s, yet the film makes no attempt to make Vegas look anything like it did thirty years ago. The casinos shown were all built within the last twenty years and even the bars, clothes, and music are 21st century, and I don't think anyone called anyone else "dude" in 1974 and I know for certain there were no cell phones (the kid's friends question why he doesn't call them on his cell when they can't reach him). If this is a story about one of the later incarnations of the M.I.T. team, however, since the newest team member is recruited to replace one who left to work for Google which wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye in the '70s, then it's just as confusing because they're talking about facial recognition software just coming into use when those types of programs have been around since the late 1980s.
In addition, if the team has been working this gig for a long time, as suggested by the fact that they need a replacement member and are not starting from scratch, then why do they go money-crazy all of a sudden? Why haven't they been filthy rich for lo these many months prior to the addition of the new member? The whole scenario makes no sense any way you try to explain it.
If you want to know how blackjack counting teams really work, don't think you're going to get any insight from this movie. But if you enjoy unlikely romances, bad guys chasing good guys, silly plot devices, and watching otherwise intelligent math professors getting double-crossed by inexperienced students in unbelievable situations, then this is the film for you.