Review: 21 Doesn’t Bring Down the House

Saw the movie 21 this weekend. The movie is loosely based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, a great book that no fewer than 6 people ranging from friends to relatives to two separate people working the counter at a bookstore (I bought the book as a gift after reading it) either heartily recommended or thoroughly enjoyed.

On the scale of a movie adaptation’s quality relative to the source material, the book clearly wins out in this case. Mezrich’s book has an immediacy and reality that screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb failed to capture. Steinfeld and Loeb didn’t have an easy task—blackjack doesn’t possess the same dramatic possibilities of poker. The uncertainty of Mezrich’s ending didn’t dissatisfy; non-fiction is like that, and not everything is wrapped up cleanly in real life. Geeks and geek culture are hard to capture without falling into stereotype (even harder on screen than in print), and almost nothing on the screen gets it right (save the occasional show like Freaks and Geeks, a series which nailed it but sadly proved not to be a commercial hit.)

Knowing the basic outline of the real-life story, for me the arc of the screenplay plodded woodenly and inevitably, although had I known nothing about the book, the shallowness of the development still would have left me even hungry for something more. Within the framework the actors are given to work, they perform well—the movie’s problems begin and end with the screenplay.

The movie trudges along methodically, the highs not particularly high, the lows not overwhelmingly low, until it starts a dive around three-quarters of the way through the movie, a dive that bottoms out with a jarring thud when a down-and-out Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) shows up on Jill’s (Kate Bosworth) doorstep in a scene that could only be called emotionally hollow and cringe-worthy.

Hollowness, in fact, captures the tone of whole movie. After clipping the treetops with this nearly fatal plummet, Steinfeld and Loeb resort to a tacked-on set piece of Hollywood twists in an attempt to salvage the screenplay, but these don’t quite sit right either. Throughout the movie we never feel anything really is at stake. There’s almost no inner emotional life to these characters and what motivations that are presented are thinly developed. Ben Campbell, genius in the counting of cards and the creative use of strippers as vehicles for money laundering, is implausibly dumb when it comes to securing his own winnings. When he tilts, there’s no logical explanation established nor retroactively given. Even Fisher’s flame-out is explained after the fact as jealousy but we are given no set-up for this. All the characterizations are notable only in how incredibly flat they are.

In the end, the movie serves as a passable adaptation, if only to get people to read the book, yet the troublesome screenplay has the feel of mercenary work outsourced to the lowest bidder. As gambling movies go, it’s no Rounders; Damon’s voice overs gave Rounders a depth and closeness that 21 lacks. As capers go, it’s no House of Games (and Spacey, in this role, is no Joe Mantegna). As Vegas flicks go, this is no Casino; we get the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood, and maybe this is unfair as the Vegas of Casino was of a grittier time than the antiseptic sheen of Vegas today. As adaptations go, it’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer, a movie that amplified and completely captured the spirit of Fred Waitzkin’s book. Look at Laurence Fishburne’s performance and character in Fischer compared to his role in 21, and you have a hint of the opportunities missed here.

Read the book first; wait for the rental.