So-So Gambling Film

Rating: 4/10 (12 May 2008)

This is a film about a group of MIT students who count cards in Vegas under the mentorship of their linear algebra professor, and win big before inevitably it all goes wrong. It's apparently 'based' on a true story; trouble is, I guess the true story isn't terribly cinematic so they've had to embellish it, and it's obvious where they've done so - the additions are grafted on very heavy-handedly.
Certainly at the start it's not a bad film, it's quite light in tone and has some nice humorous touches. The introduction to card counting is fairly interesting, although I think the method outlined here is probably rather simplified to allow cinema audiences to follow it.
A major problem for the film is that Blackjack simply isn't a much of a spectator sport; poker may not be all that great to watch if you're not playing, but at least you can craft some drama from the to's and fro's of a hand. Pontoon, though? Forget about it - it's just too simple a game.
Since the game isn't all that interesting, the film must rely on the characters, and while Jim Sturgess is good enough in the lead role of the student who takes part reluctantly only to raise funds his doctorate before being seduced by the easy money, reminding me here a bit of Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal, none of the others ever rise much beyond a cardboard cutout - including Kevin Spacey, who has precious little to do here as the professor. Most wasted (and objectionable) of all here, however, is Lawrence Fishburne, playing a casino 'loss preventer', in the film for little more than a cameo, and never really rising beyond the role of a simple thug. The other gambling students are shallow and unlikeable, whereas Sturgess' old friends are geek stereotypes straight out of Weird Science.
One flaw that really stuck in my mind was that for all the talk of the need to be surreptitious and under-the-radar of the casinos, the students go out of their way to get noticed, going crazy Vegas-style repeatedly, and employing ludicrously obvious signs to each other, never once varying them - if they wanted to get noticed by the casino security people they went exactly the right way about it. I very much doubt if this is what happened in reality.
The twists at the end are all a bit contrived and aimed towards producing an ending that ties everything up neatly; too neatly for me, it was totally unsatisfying. The choice of You Can't Always Get What You Want for the final credits is as predictable as the rest of the film. Horrible mix, too.