It’s not unusual for South by Southwest to select a high-profile studio release as the opening night attraction, but it’s hard to understand how a movie as slick and empty as 21 could have been chosen for the honor. It’s an anti-SXSW film if ever there was one.
Directed by Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law), 21 is based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, although there’s no evidence on the screen to suggest that anyone involved with the production read any further than the title on the book’s cover. Mezrich’s book is nonfiction; Luketic’s movie is nonsense.
Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) is Ben Campbell, an M.I.T. student with plans to attend grad school at Harvard. The tuition is a little out of his reach: in the neighborhood of $300,000. His nonlinear equations professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) takes an interest in Ben and invites him to join an extracurricular student group he’s mentoring. These math geniuses have used their skills to develop a sophisticated blackjack card–counting system – or at least, we’re forced to assume it’s sophisticated. Screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb have boiled the mechanics of 21, one of the most engrossing sections of the book, down to a handful of gestures and code words.
Rosa and his students take the act on the road to Vegas, where they work the tables as a team. The big flaw in their plan is that they apparently only hit the casinos where Laurence Fishburne is in charge of security. Soon the entire operation is at risk, along with Ben’s future.
Spacey isn’t believable for a second; Larry the Cable Guy would make a more convincing math professor. As the team’s two Asian-American members, Liza Lapira and Aaron Yoo radiate ten times as much charisma as Sturgess and co-star Kate Bosworth in a fraction of the screen time. (The actual M.I.T. blackjack team was predominantly Asian-American, but heaven forbid we be deprived of bland, attractive white people in the leading roles.) Between the Scorsese-lite stylistics and the dumbed-down plot (including a stupid vengeance twist and an obligatory romance), it’s tempting to think the SXSW powers-that-be chose to show 21 first only to make the rest of the festival selections look even better.