How to ruin a fascinating true story.

Rating: 5/10 (1 May 2009)

Ah, Las Vegas, the city of lights. The place that probably offers more false promises than anywhere else in the world, Hollywood included. I've never been much of a gambler myself, usually when I go there I plan a given amount of money to gamble with and, once it's gone (because I understand in advance that I'm gonna lose it) then I stop and go back to my buddies and concentrate on getting nicely drunk. But cards are even less my thing. My friends back in Venice Beach had almost nightly poker tournaments that I couldn't get myself interested in to save my life, so my experience in gambling real money on card games is almost nonexistent.
Nevertheless, I have an endless fascination with Vegas, and the true story of those people from MIT who raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars by counting cards at the blackjack tables should have been a great movie. Unfortunately, 21 is not it. The movie deals with the true story of those MIT students, but the movie is so heavily fictionalized that it's nearly impossible to tell what really happened under what ultimately turns out to be a twisted mass of Hollywood clichés.
Jim Sturgess plays Ben Campbell, a college student graduating from MIT and about to fulfill his lifelong dream of attending Harvard Medical School. The only problem is that he doesn't have any money and Harvard Med will run him $300,000. Since he lives in a world that contains one single scholarship opportunity and not a hint of student loans (seriously, with an academic history like Ben's, there are about a million ways to get the money he needs), he sees his chances of going to Harvard Med slipping away.
Soon he meets a professor, Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) who introduces him to a carefully designed card-counting scheme involving himself and a few of his most gifted students. They all head to Vegas and try to beat the system, while security chief Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne) lurks in the darkened security office surrounded by TV screens watching out for people like them. I wanted to see a movie about the real story, something almost documentary-like that tells not only how they beat the Vegas system but also how they got caught and what happened afterwards, but 21 plays more like a completely fictional story. It's like a cheap version of Ocean's 11 except the only laws being broken are when Williams drags various characters into the casino basement to, ah, knock some sense out of them.
I have no idea how card counting works, I'm just not a math guy. The movie doesn't concern itself with helping us understand it either, beyond some quickly edited sequences showing the main characters devising an intricate counting and communication scheme that will allow them to work together in the casinos without anyone realizing that they are a team. The problem is that the card counting itself requires a tremendous intellect, but the characters are phenomenally stupid.
Are we supposed to believe that the same people who perfected this counting scheme would come up with signals so stupidly obvious as linking your arms behind your back when the deck's hot? It was bad enough that they all constantly glance nervously at each other whenever they're in the same room, but that arm-linking thing was amazing. Every single time!! Didn't they ever think it would be a good idea to change things up a little bit? It would require a stupendous quantity of incompetence on the part of the security administration to miss THAT.
Even worse is the fact that in order to remind us that they're humans, the characters have to make drastic mistakes, but drastic gambling mistakes done well will give you something like the poker scene at the end of Casino Royale. Here, they get dunk and blow their cover or make gambling errors that can only be described as purely moronic, and the screenplay is more concerned with cheesy relationships between the characters that only distract from what the story is really about. Pearl Harbor had the same problem. We want to see a story about a major historical event, not some idiotic romance between Josh Hartnett and whoever that girl was.
Even worse, nothing is told about what happened after they were caught. They won't go to jail because counting cards isn't illegal (and shouldn't be), but the movies ties everything up with so much obviously fabricated nonsense that it's nearly impossible to walk out of the theater without feeling cheated. And in a movie about card-counting and taking Vegas for hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's the casinos who should feel cheated, not the audience.