'21' Movie Review

**Mild Spoilers! Some plot line revealed, but nothing major. If you have not yet seen the movie, you may not want to read the entire article.**

If you went to the movies this past weekend, chances are you were there to see 21. Despite mixed reviews by the critics, 21 opened number one at the box office, bumping Dr. Seuss's 'Horton Hears A Who' out of the top spot after being there two weeks running. Based on Ben Mezrich's best selling novel 'Bringing Down The House,' the premise of 21 involves six MIT students trained by one of their professors to count cards and take Las Vegas casino's for millions.

The movie opens with Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) at a meeting concerning his scholarship application for Harvard Medical School. Despite his outstanding grades and involvement in extra curricular activities, the professor warns Ben that there are dozens of others applying for this scholarship that have the exact same resume. Ben inquires as to how he might stand out among the others and he is told that his essay about a life experience will most likely be the determining factor.

Ben, who is saddened by the fact that he will probably not go to Harvard Med because of lack of money, returns to MIT to finish out his classes. In one particular class, Professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) takes an interest in Ben when he is able to solve math equations with rational reasoning. Later that evening, a student named Fisher (Jacob Pitts) comes to find Ben and brings him to a secluded class room. There he finds 5 students (including Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth) a student whom Ben has had a crush on for some time) and Professor Rosa. They invite him in and tell him about the card counting scheme they've developed and how they fly to Vegas every weekend and put their plan into action. Ben, weary of their plan, declines to join them at first, but we all knew that he'd eventually cave.

As the reality of his situation sinks in, Ben quickly realizes that without the scholarship, he'd have no way to get into Harvard Med, but if he plays black jack in Vegas, he has a chance to win the $300,000 he needs for medical school. So Ben takes the plunge and joins in. The group fills him in on the plan; they have a simple method for counting cards. Within the group they have small players who sit at tables and determine whether or not the deck is hot, and they have big players, who join the tables after being given the signal that the table is worth sitting at. When the big player sits, the small player makes some sort of comment that involves a key word that will alert the big player to the current card count. Signals were also developed for when the table had cooled off or if a player needed to leave immediately.

Like all card playing movies go, at first they were doing well. Every weekend the group was flying to Vegas and taking the casinos for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but like in all movies, good things must come to an end. Bitter Cole Williams (Lawrence Fishburn) is a long time security guru who has a knack for catching card counters. He zones in on Ben and the gang and quickly realizes what they are doing. So of course trouble ensues.

Going any further with the plot would reveal some of the twists and turns that this movie takes, but it is definitely a movie well worth watching. Many of the parts were very believable, but some seemed too far fetched. Black Jack is the most popular card game played on the planet. This movie made it seem way too easy to beat the casinos, but maybe they made it unrealistic so that moviegoers wouldn't try to go out and cheat themselves. While counting cards is basic math, in the movie, they never accounted for the two decks that are always buried when playing black jack at a casino. It would take a genius to be able to mathematically account for the cards that might be buried in those decks.

Putting that one fact aside, this was a very smart movie. There were rarely dull parts, and just when you thought you had the ending figured out, you are thrown for one last loop. I have to be honest and say that overall, it was pretty predictable (I guess I should say that the ending was pretty predictable), but that doesn't mean that watching the film was any less enjoyable. For anyone who likes action, cards, vengeance, a little romance and Vegas, this is definitely a movie for you! I would recommend 21 to anyone, definitely a movie worth seeing.

Sources:

The Boston Globe. "'21' Comes Up Aces". Boston.com