Interesting story; a little shallow emotionally

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2008)

Nice try--and I always want to cut no less stellar a personage as Spacey some slack--but in the end it didn't quite resonate.
I think I have a bone to pick with movies that resort to plot devices like 1) the sting 2) guy-gets-girl (absent a genuinely warm human interest), 3) a litany of reversals, and 5) a "rising from the ashes" wrap-it-up-put-a-bow-on-it feelgood ending, without a proper denouement.
Reflecting on this gives me new respect for the core narrative power of opera. Opera is, come to think of it, irrational, in that typically no effort is made to vest one narrative element with special resonance by virtue of its contrast against other elements. The goal in Opera is to simply present a fairly unitary image, and tease the romantic power out of that image. The idea is that love, courage--even unmitigated malfeasance--properly presented, will deliver the goods, if all the buttons are pushed that properly present that image in a way that can't be made light of or otherwise ignored.
"21" doesn't really have that unitary image; something truly heroic, notwithstanding that fairly artful final scene.
In the end, the film feels gimmicky. Too many moving parts, some of them just don't quite fit, and those weaknesses could have been avoided by stripping them out and having a core image that resonates; which, despite efforts to make the central theme do so, didn't.
Sorry! Can't recommend this one....
I do want to add one thing: I feel that Spacey is a kind of Mingus of American movies; he has this abiding desire to assemble a crop of young talent and make then deliver. That's respectable. But sometimes the actual effect is like that when Mingus was working with a passel of raw talent: A lot of rawness. And, of course, the preceding observations re weakness in conception/design apply.