Movie and Television Reviews

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Like Fast and Furious, Tin Men, Quiz Show, Michael Clayton, and others, 21 is a movie that envelopes the viewer in a subculture unfamiliar to all but its participants. The secret to a good Discovery movie is making the audience feel as though the movie's milieu is actually important and that they're actually learning something.

21 succeeds on both counts. For two hours, I only cared about "beating the house." I can see people picking up card-counting books (I penciled one into Nelson Jr.'s reading list.) and Vegas hotels having some heavy booking days as a result of 21.

In 21, genius, nerd, suit salesman, and Harvard Med School acceptee Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) needs $300,000 to pay for Medical School. He tries for a scholarship, but leaves the interview unsure that he can sufficiently “dazzle” the interviewer with his life experience.

After hearing Campbell's impressive analysis of the Monty Hall math problem, college professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) recruits Campbell into a secret team of card players who combine their Ivy League-caliber brains with some sophisticated and deceptive house-busting card-counting techniques to make thousands of dollars. Campbell reluctantly joins the team and soon becomes the star player. The team wins consistently. Eventually, Campbell changes from super-geek to super-stud- on the way gaining a girl, the beautiful Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth), and losing his nerdy friends who are working on some kind of island-of-misfit-Radio Shack-toys Robot.

Tyco R/C Cars Lightning McQueen 1:16

Campbell has inter-group conflicts with Fisher (Jacob Pitts), the usurped “big player,” and Jill. The whole team has issues with Mickey Rosa. The uninteresting nerds and a Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne)- led security firm that identifies card counters add some external-to-the-group conflict

The security firm subplot is both exciting and, surely, unrealistic. Williams doesn't go the counters and politely asks them, as one might imagine, to leave- he beats them up in the boiler room. I'm not a legal expert, but if a casino extra-legally beat me up, and I didn't even break the law, I'd sue.

21's best moment is when Rosa leaves the team after Campbell loses $250,000 in an “emotional” outburst. The director creates real tension as the team decides to go it without Rosa.

Besides the annoying, smart-aleck dialog- especially by the intense Rosa and Asian Choi, the been-there nerd humor, Campbell's mysterious pangs of conscience prior to joining the group, and a lackluster love story, I didn't catch any huge flaws in the movie. 21 is a solid, if unspectacular film.

Politics/ Message:

21 faintly urges loyalty amongst team members and friends, as Campbell regrets losing his nerd posse and stays loyal to his counting crew. The real lesson could very well be the healthy, “Do your homework and be a genius millionaire that gets hot chicks.”

Not too much in the way of politics. Barack Obama may have wanted to help Campbell with his tuition bill, although Campbell would still be $284,000 short with Obama's college welfare program.

Rosa doesn't explain why he doesn't trust girls to gamble, but ultra-feminists may pick a bone with that.

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