Predictable Mess

Rating: 3/10 (19 August 2015)

21 is predictable and has clouded motivations on what we are hearing this story.
Despite a few performances the acting is dull and wooden. The characters are not fleshed out except for our leading actor who had the strongest performance, even though his performance was still not that strong. The script is messy and predictable. Once Kevin Spacey's character is invited back to play in Vegas again you know what is going to happen for the last half hour of the movie. The opening and closing scenes are probably the worst thing this movie has going for it. It opens up that this college student wants to get a scholarship to Harvard because he can't afford the tuition and he has to write an essay about a life experience that would make the school want to give him this scholarship. So he decides to tell the school about how he went to Vegas and became a criminal and got his teacher at MIT beat up by the casino security. Then in the closing scene he makes all of these comments like: "Does that impress you?" or "Did that make you go 'wow'?" The other part about the script that bothered me was how they kept going back to the same casino even though they knew security was watching them and knew who they were. For the dialogue, there is some really cheesy romantic dialogue that doesn't work. Also some scenes are supposed to funny and they really are not.
This movie was very disappointing please don't watch it. Save yourself the pain.