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"I'm not the same guy I was back in Boston."

Screened at the SXSW Film Festival

Prior to the premiere showing of 21 at the SXSW film festival, Robert Luketic got up and told us about how hard he -- a relatively established director of lightweight comedies like Legally Blonde and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton -- had to work to be permitted to make an "action movie." The fact that he conceives of 21 as an action movie goes a long way toward explaining how he managed to screw it up so badly. He takes this wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime premise and beats it until it dies.

The film is based on a book called Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, a wildly entertaining true-life account of a group of MIT students who, led by a rogue professor, devised and implemented a complicated -- and somewhat dangerous -- blackjack card-counting plan that let them rip off a series of Vegas casinos to the tune of several million dollars. Luketic's approach to this material was to adorn it with useless contrivances, inject it with a dose of Hollywood formula, and throw it on the screen with endless, relentless gloss and flash. 21 is big, loud, and ultimately stupid -- and there was no reason for it to be any of those things.

My prevailing thought as I watched was that I wanted to harpoon the sound designer. When I expressed this sentiment to friends who saw the screening, they replied that the problem was probably the sound at Austin's Paramount Theater, and indeed, the mix was heavy on the bass and disproportionately favored the sound effects (as opposed to the dialogue). But that does nothing to mitigate the fact that every single drop of a playing card or push of a blackjack chip is accompanied by a theater-shaking (at least at the Paramount) boom or whoosh. Given how many cards are dealt and chips anteed throughout the nearly two-hour film, that's a lot of booms and whooshes. And given that the card-playing -- which takes up a good quarter of the running-time, I'd say -- comes in the form of glitzy, elaborate montages accompanied by a pounding glam-rock soundtrack, the cumulative effect is mind-numbing. The movie has basically one mode, and that is aggressive audio-visual assault.

Luketic is so busy crafting 21's overstuffed, basically artless look and sound that he forgets most of what's actually interesting about this story. For one thing, he never really explains the mechanics of the students' card-counting scheme. We learn some of how it works -- there's a fairly effective scene showing, in slow-motion, a character actually working to keep the count -- but those less familiar with blackjack will be at a loss to figure out what it is our heroes our doing and how they're getting rich. And, because the movie doesn't have time to explore the fascinating details, it makes its genius characters out to be idiots -- they never alter their signal system or adapt in any way to avoid the wrath of casino security (embodied here by Laurence Fishburne). There are dozens of other necessary elements of a plan like this that the film simply ignores.

The characters are, for no good reason, forced to operate within the confines of predictable, formulaic structures. Our protagonist, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) is meant to be an MIT nerd whose old friendships and allegiances wane as the allure of Vegas takes hold -- his mind, it seems to him, is put to much better use in a casino than in a robotics competition. His fragile relationships with his old friends might have been touching had their course not been obvious from their start -- you can recite every scene (he starts showing up late to meetings, slacking in his share of their workload, they have a big confrontation, he tells them he doesn't care about the stupid robotics competition anyway...) before you see it.

What's really unforgivable, though, is what the screenplay does to the tale's last act. The resolution, which involves a three-front battle of wits among Ben, Fishburne's casino thug, and the unscrupulous Professor Rosa (Kevin Spacey), is off-the-rails ridiculous; in its desperation to deliver an action-packed suspense set piece of an ending, 21 asks the audience to suspend all disbelief, and basically begs to be laughed at. Worse, the contortions are totally unnecessary, since the plot needed neither surprise twists nor a pulse-pounding resolution.

This is still a great story, and 21 is rarely boring (though, since it never manages to calm down, it is often exhausting.) Jim Sturgess both manages a convincing American accent and convinces us that his character is a prodigy; surprisingly, Kate Bosworth is also plausible as his card-counting girlfriend. The film is more moralistic than the book -- bad things start happening precisely when Ben decides to play for more than he needs to finance med school -- but that's an acceptable concession to the new medium. What I can't get past is the waste: this is a dumb adaptation of fantastic material. Pick up the book instead.

--Eugene Novikov