Pun Salad

21 is based on a thin reed of fact: an MIT-based team of students really did have a surreptitious scheme in the 90s to visit casinos and try to beat the house at blackjack. A book was written about the team by Ben Mezrich; you can read his Wired article based on the book here. However, the book was described in the Boston Globe earlier this year as being "embellished beyond recognition."

So they took this already-fictionalized version of the true story, and further gussied it up with sex and violence (although at a strictly PG-13 level). Bottom line: don't believe anything.

Worse, it's a pretty lousy movie. The main character, "Ben", is apparently supposed to be sympathetic. At the start of the movie, he's a straight-A MIT senior already accepted at Harvard Med. In short, he has advantages that 99.99% of his peers lack. And, as a result, he's … shallow and whiny. About his lack of funds. About his lack of a social life. Boo hoo. Any sane person watching the movie would want to slap him silly.

Ben's math wizardry becomes known to Professor Rosa, played by Kevin Spacey. And, after initial misgivings, he joins up with Rosa's gang. He's wildly successful, which changes him from a whiny shallow geek into a whiny shallow high-roller, who neglects his studies and treats his previous geek friends shabbily. He reneges on his previous promise to quit after winning the $300K necessary for Harvard. Of course, this turns out to be a bad call, and eventually results in a serious beatdown from seriously pudgy Laurence Fishburne, representing casino security. So Ben has another character transformation, repentant, but still whiny. And stabs Prof Rosa in the back. [Sorry, that's kind of a spoiler, but you shouldn't care.]

The movie has no detectable humor, save for lame stereotypes about Asians and geeks. Kevin Spacey delivers some of his lines with snap, but this just makes them seem slightly less stupid than they are.