Try your luck elsewhere

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2008)

The true story of six MIT kids who try to fleece Vegas is embellished to say the least in "21." There's lots of added drama, a heap of unintentional campiness, plot twists you can see coming down the Strip, and a love story thrown in for the hell of it. This flick was made for the MTV set...the mechanics of how these kids actually count cards to beat the system is explained quickly but not well. I'm probably an idiot (and I haven't read the book upon which the movie is based) but I still don't get it. This movie makes the "how" not really matter anyway. Why explain boring old math when you can have montages of our ethnically diverse group of spoiled geniuses bar hopping and shopping at Louis Vuitton? If you've seen the trailers than you know 21...there are no surprises here. There is a long running time that makes the last 30 minutes of the film agonizing. There's a few ham-fisted plot twists and double crosses and I kept expecting the movie to end...then WHAM, another scene of our lead character back at the tables in a cheesy disguise and more slow motion shots of the dealer flipping cards.
Sturgess is barely passable as Ben...he doesn't quite have the magnetism to pull off the various emotional shadings required of the role. There are parts where he underplays emotion and parts where he overplays them...he never really finds a medium. "21" would have been great ten years ago; give me Giovanni Ribisi in the Ben role and you have something cooking. But Sturgess is pretty blah...so is Kate Bosworth, who looks a lot like Priscilla Presley and nothing like a college student. The only two actors worth a damn here are Spacey, the acerbic ringleader of the young card counters, and the underused Jacob Pitts, who helps recruit Ben into the group.
21 does well to show the all-night-long decadence of Vegas, and there are some beautiful shots of the Strip at night. Otherwise the flick is by-the-numbers garbage.