21 A Bad Shuffle of a Superb Nonfiction Classic

Rating: Null/10 (6 August 2008)

21 is a poor version of Ben Mezrich's best-selling 2002 Bringing Down the House. The original story is about five Asian MIT students who walked off with $3 million card counting at various casinos around the country, beginning in the early nineties.
The movie makers have constructed a half-baked love story that isn't actually in the book. With the romantic intrusion, the thriller aspect of the original is lost. The book may have been tricked up a little. But 21, the movie seems bent on helping casino security Bull Laurence Fishburne keep his image intact and that of the Vegas casinos unblemished. Because the characters appear to be playing in real Las Vegas casinos, at least at times, it looks as if producers may have cut a deal with Vegas to soften both Fishburne's tough guy image and minimize embarrassment the Casinos suffered at the hands of the merry MIT crew.
In the book, the casinos and their pit bosses and security people were clods who never caught onto a thing for over six years. The movie hasn't got time for that long a wait. Fishburne is suspicious of lead Ben Campbell almost instantly.
Here's a major myth that grew up in the seventies that the book explodes: Casinos spread the story that once multi-decks were placed in shoes, card counting wouldn't work anymore. In fact, multi-decks actually improved odds for counting players by lengthening the period of time that dealer's hands stayed hot for players and cold for dealers.
In the film the MIT crew does all its work in Vegas. In the book, the MIT gang went to riverboats around Chicago, to Louisiana and Missisippi Indian casinos and even overseas to Monte Carlo and Cannes.
In the film, Kevin Spacey is an MIT math prof who spearheads the Casino Con and enlists his own students to be his players. A college girl is in love with the hero Ben Campbell. In reality, all of the players were Asians who wore disguises and masqueraded as rich orientals out to blow big money at the tables. Mickey(Spacey), the crew leader and organizer is an MIT prof and a professional gambler too.
The movie constructs a fiction that Campbell only wants to make $300,000 to finance his education at Harvard as a doctor. The truth is the real Jeff Ma never went to Med School and never wanted to. Ma and the four orientals who took down Vegas, worked the various casinos for nearly ten years and only gave it up when most casinos in the country had identified them and they could no longer play.
Somewhere in the middle of the book Mickey and the Ben Campbell character modeled on Jeff Ma split, and begin running separate teams in the casinos. The movie has Mickey (Spacey) fingering Ben and his team to Casino Security. That would have exposed Mickey too. Its absurd. In fact, though there was some minor bad blood after the split, it was in the interests of both teams to keep quiet about one another. And that is what they did.
In the book, the players wore disguises always and changed them often so they wouldn't be recognized when they returned to the same casinos. The movie talked of disguises but Ben never actually wore won except once. It made no sense. He'd have been caught on the second visit without a disguise. In the film, one of the hand signals to tip the Ben to the 'hot' blackjack table, was so blatantly obvious, no pit manager or security bull could have missed it.
The movie left two nerdy friends of Ben Campbell's lurking around MIT clueless about Ben's weekend table action. Those characters and the plots around them were lame. The whole college crosscut was so weak they might just as well have eliminated it altogether. Trying to merge the college weekdays and weekend gambling simply didn't play. Campbell (Jim Sturges) was supposed to have been half-enticed into the ring by his yen for fellow student Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). But the romance seemed half-hearted once underway. The book knew better. The deceptions and nearly being caught by security time after time took up all the action and made the book a unique thriller.
Movie makers constructed a supposed collusion between Campbell and Security Bull Fishburne to get even with Mickey. The tacked on ending was so absurd anyone could see through it. In fact, Jeff Ma is not a WASP like the one Campbell portrayed, but an oriental. The four fellow Oriental MIT students worked the casinos for nearly ten years and were well into their thirties before they quit. Only near the end of that time were they thoroughly caught, identified and forced to stop. I'm not sure any of them ever graduated from MIT. Ma didn't.
Spacey and Fishburne give routine performances as if they couldn't take the film seriously. I wonder why? In the washroom afterward I told two twenty somethings what a pack of lies the film was and gave them the book title so they could read the true story. 21 could have been a remarkable film in the hands of a writer-director like Dave Mamet. The film was market designed as a cross between Wedding Crashers and a bad Adam Sandler movie. A few of the six college students behind me kept mistaking ordinary lines as American Pie easy laughs, but the rest of the audience stayed silent.
The Filmmakers, who are not worth mentioning, destroyed a perfectly wonderful story that could have been a great movie. They doubled down in duplicity.