Review: “21″

21 directed by Robert Luketic, USA, 2008. Reviewed by James 3/28/08.

Lyn Elliot, a film teacher who taught Julian everything he knows about filmmaking (j/k Julian), came into my documentary film class and showed us a short doc she had made about card counters, people who keep track of the statistical placement of cards in a deck in order to have a better chance of winning at blackjack. Casinos will kick your ass up and down the Vegas strip if they catch you doing it, but with a little strategy and a dependable group of people, one can make quite a bit of money at it. There’s a scene in there where one group is counting a bunch of huge stacks of money, tens of thousands of dollars. She interviewed a number of people for the piece: her parents, who used to do it but quit; a group of people who still do it and do it for a living, and a group of MIT students who did it as a hobby. She even snuck a camera into a casino and got some footage of the people in action. Her documentary was a fascinating inside look into a little known subculture.

And, as you might expect, that is exactly what 21 is not. It’s about some nerd guy, the handsome one out of his group of ugly nerd friends, who joins up with the aforementioned MIT team and wins a whole bunch of money, then loses it, then gets some of it back again. Kevin Spacey is in it too, as a math teacher.

It’s a stupid movie for a number of reasons. For one, they decide insipidly that they need to keep reminding us that the nerd guy (I will not look up the actor’s or character’s name, because I don’t care) is really good at math. A scholarship judge reads off his transcript, perfect marks in math classes, perfect on the SATs. But that’s not enough so there’s a scene where he upstages Spacey’s and lays down all kinds of math skills, in a scene using the classic Monty Hall problem. (Google it). But that’s not enough so there’s a scene where a customer at the clothes store he works at ask him how much the total will be and he just adds up all the prices in his head. But that’s not enough so he follows that by saying to the customer “I’m pretty good with numbers.” But that’s not enough so Spacey just keeps telling him that he’s good, real good, you remind me of me when I was young, you’re real good kid, the best, you’re good.

Goddamnit.

The movie is filled with shit like this. Uninteresting, unbelievable characters. Stupid, unbelievable plot twists. The nerd, this genius math kid, accepted at Harvard Med, you know what he does. He stores his goddamn money inside a drop ceiling and is then shocked when all 300,000 dollars of it is stolen. That was money he needed for Harvard by the way.

Other than the nerd guy, there’s Kate Bosworth as tits, some guy who looks and acts like Jonah Hill as the nerd guy’s nerd friend who looks and acts like Jonah Hill, and Lawrence Fishburne as the casino security guard who beats the shit out of anyone who he catches counting cards. He fills a similar role in this movie as Sam Jackson does in Jumper, which leads me to believe that there is a new stereotypical black character in movies today, that of the buzzkilling negro.

Also, this just in: apparently the nerd guy is based on a MIT student (I neglected to mention that this movie is LOOSELY based on a true story.) who is Asian-American. The guy in this movie is white, so very, very white. So there’s that too. And yes the info I am reading does tell me the name of the character and the actor but no I won’t write it here because I don’t care and neither should you.

Rating: 1 out of 5 screens