Outstanding, intriguing, exciting, well written, and entertaining are all very accurate terms for the film 21. Unfortunately they only pertain to the film’s trailer. If you seen the trailer for this movie, then you’ve seen enough. In fact, the movie ruins the trailer.
Blackjack is my favorite card game and I was very hyped to see this film, especially with Kevin Spacey in a feature role. Before the film starts you feel like you’re sitting pretty with two face cards and the dealer only showing a 3. However by the middle of the film, the dealer flips over his ace, and finishes you off by pulling a 7 for one of the most uninteresting and predictable endings I’ve ever seen.
Blackjack is a very fast-paced game, but this film decided to play 52-card pickup with the tempo. Boring, self-indulgent writing, only saved by Spacey’s delivery, and repetitive blackjack montages make this movie feel much longer than its 2-hour runtime. I prefer the 2-minute trailer, which gave you everything you needed to know about this film, plus you don’t have be tortured with a pretentious finale.
The acting in this film is as flat as a pair of 4’s. Spacey does the best he can, which is better than anyone else, but even his great talent could not save this mundane and very amateurish script. Laurence Fishburne’s part was so exaggerated it was like he was playing a caricature. This film actually expects you to believe that today’s multi-billion dollar casinos still take people into a back room somewhere, rough them up, and intimidate them from ever counting cards again. Yes Fishburne’s character is a Vegas dinosaur being forced out of the surveillance business by high-tech facial recognition software, however casinos risking their gambling license and a 100-million dollar lawsuit, just to teach some MIT students a lesson is a big stretch in today’s sue-happy legal system. The scenes are laughable and take you out of the film immediately.
Another major disappointment is that the film totally ignores the game in which the movie is titled after. Movies based on games or sports hinge on the quality of the scenes involving the action of those sports/games. Films like Rounders, Run, and even Lucky You, make good on the playing-card scenes with intense situations and characters you give a damn about. In 21 you could care less if someone loses a hand, if you can even distinguish one. About 90 percent of the blackjack scenes are lost in horrible montages. Yes there is a challenge of trying to make a really dramatic scene out of such a short game, but it’s not impossible. The film just uses blackjack as the vehicle to move around these two-dimensional characters until it can crowbar in a lame attempt at a plot-twist ending.
Which brings us to the most fascinating part of this film, its unintentionally ironic conclusion. And the irony had nothing do with the actual story in the film. Kevin Spacey was the central part of arguably the greatest ending in cinematic history with his role in The Usual Suspects. Spacey is now on the other end of the spectrum with the anti-climatic ending in 21. And I use the term “anti-climatic” loosely because it implies the film had some “build-up” to begin with. Director Robert Luketic, (Monster-In-Law, Legally Blonde), uses slow motion and backtrack-cut scenes to make you think what’s happening at the end of this film is some “great reveal.” You don’t have to be Rain Man to count into this movie’s proverbial deck.
Story: 5.0
Acting: 5.5
Writing: 5.0
Captivation: 4.0
Replay Value: 4.5
Total Score: 4.8
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
