By the numbers thriller

Rating: 4/10 (23 July 2008)

There have been many great movies about casinos, but '21' is sadly not one of them. Heavy handed, unsubtle and obvious, it's a film about a maths professor who gathers a team of elite students to pull of a gambling scam. But every point is clumsily made: the hero is a genius who just wants to pay his fees for Harvard Medical School; his friends are geeks but this fellow gamblers are all glamorous; the direction of the plot is highly signalled and even the twists are well-signposted; someone turns out to be utterly (and arguably incoherently) villainous, and so on. What makes this so bad is the fact that the film attempts to disguise its ordinariness behind a veneer of pseudo-cleverness: for example, the hero proves his brilliance to us (and his tutor) by solving a probability problem that is in fact well known outside mathematical circles and which he is posed in the middle of a lecture that is nothing to do with probability theory; while the basics of the scam are laid out on the table for the audience, but it's details remain obscure and unexplained. It's a shame, as if the film didn't labour its points so badly, it could still have been entertaining. As it is, it's by the numbers stuff which, in the words of a line uttered in it by Kevin Spacey's character, won't tell you anything you didn't already know.