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Rating: Country: USA Release Date: July 21, 2008 Distributor: Sony Pictures Director: · Robert Luketic Cast: · Kevin Spacey · Laurence Fishburne · Jim Sturgess · Kate Bosworth · Jacob Pitts · Aaron Yoo · Liza Lapira Related Sites: · IMDb: "21" Grade: B

Based upon the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, "21" is a captivating tale for people who enjoy films about smart people getting away with cool and dangerous things.

Director Robert Luketic has assembled an energetic cast of young actors that tend to chew up the scenery as well as they deliver their lines, with the primary focus on Jim Sturgess as young Ben Campbell and Kate Bosworth as his seemingly unattainable object of desire.

Ben is an MIT student applying for a Harvard scholarship. His grades are impeccable, but he lacks the life experience necessary to create a "dazzling" essay which forms the tipping point for the judges. When he demonstrates a keen, near-Newtonian grasp on mathematical principles while attending a lecture, he impresses Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), who approaches him with the idea of putting his mind to a profitable use -- playing Blackjack as part of a card-counting team of students.

 

Teacher and Student. Professor Rosa mentors Ben in the art of the deal. (L-R: Spacey, Sturgess)

The fun in "21" is in seeing the team of students interact, passing their signals along as they keep track of the count and take the tables for as much as they can. But that's not the only story. Paralleling this is the tale of Cole Williams, a casino security expert facing the end of an era as facial recognition software pushes his skill set into obsolescence. The Hard Rock is his last contract, and it is while manning the cameras there that he and his men begin to catch on to the scam the MIT kids are running.

They quickly grab Ben and bring him to the back room... which is bad, as it's the only room in the casino that doesn't have cameras. What happens there really stays there.

Spacey dominates every scene he's in, in a compelling role which always seems to have something dangerous bubbling just beneath the surface of his pleasantness. Likewise, Fishburne "thug eyeing retirement" is an interesting character study, far different than your usual casino muscle portrayals. However, the film may have limited itself in being a little too smart for audiences, who sometimes have trouble enough juggling subplots without having to throw rudimentary arithmetic into the equation.

This two-disc release includes an optional commentary track with Luketic and two of the three producers -- Dana Brunetti and Mike DeLuca. (The third producer was Spacey, whose take I'd have particularly have enjoyed were it present.)

The second disc includes the software to download a second copy of the film to your PC, and a number of interesting featurettes. "The Advantage Player" is five and a half minutes with the actors explaining the history of blackjack, including mathematician Roger Baldwin's treatise, Basic Strategy. But that strategy still leaves you at a one percent disadvantage to the house -- so they finish up by teaching you how to count cards using the "plus one, minus one" system seen in the film.

"Basic Strategy: A Complete Film Journal" is twenty-five minutes spent behind the scenes of the film, and includes interviews with Ben Mezrich telling the story of how the book came to be, with input from one of the MIT students who truly pulled it off, Jeff Ma (who appears in a cameo role in the film as a blackjack dealer). Kevin Spacey is also interviewed, as he tells how he first heard the story, and the filmmakers expound on their first foray into digital filming and the hazards of shooting on location in an open and operating casino.

Rounding out the featurettes is "Money Plays: A Tour of the Good Life." This looks at first to be an expanded advertisement for Las Vegas, but is actually another making-of set piece explaining the differences in setting and fashion between Boston and Vegas, all in just seven minutes.

Audio is available in English, French or Spanish, with optional subtitling available in all three languages. The feature commentary is also subtitled in English and Spanish.

Previews on this disc include "The House Bunny."