Constant Viewer: 21
D.A. Ridgely on Mar 28th 2008
Hit me! Hit me again! Again! Just please, please don’t ever make me watch 21 again!
21 is the story of someone we can all identify with: the kind of poor struggling senior at MIT who has already been accepted at Harvard Medical School but can’t figure out how to pay for it (future Harvard MDs being such poor credit risks) until he is recruited into a card counting club that flies to Vegas on weekends, works the blackjack tables, indulges in a little partying and power shopping, then flies back to Cambridge in time for class on Monday morning. A regular Joe like you or me, in other words. And just like you or I would, he keeps his winnings in cash wrapped by rubber bands in plain sight above the suspended ceiling of his dorm room. College dorm rooms are, after all, famously private places and vastly safer than safety deposit boxes, not to mention his widowed mother’s house, apparently only a short commute away.
Like the rest of his MIT student card counting club, he is not only slightly smarter than the average Vegas gambler, he is also vastly more physically attractive, a fact that had heretofore been hidden back in Cambridge behind his expensive, preppy J. Press wardrobe.* Well, sure. When CV imagines a half dozen extremely attractive young high rollers, the first think that pops into his head is kids from M.I.T. You know, like Click and Clack from Car Talk and Richard Feynman – nonstop party animals! (Yes, CV knows Feynman actually did turn into a bit of a party animal eventually, but not as an undergraduate, fergawdsakes.)
And speaking of party animals, there’s Kevin Spacey as your typical M.I.T. professor. Well, assuming that the typical M.I.T. professor’s last name, if it isn’t Soze, is Moriarty. Oh, and in lieu of real action or dramatic tension there’s a bit of thuggery from Laurence Fishburne. Does he really need the work? Did he take all that Matrix money and put it on 21-Red to win?
21 claims to be “inspired by the true story of five students.” Hey, there’s even a book! CV just hopes the real kids took Vegas for more than 21 ‘wins’ from unsuspecting moviegoers but, life being what it is, he wouldn’t bet on it.
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* Unless you are, yourself, something of an uber-prep who has also lived in New Haven, Cambridge, New York or Washington, you’ve probably never heard of J. Press before and are even now confusing it with J. Crew, the comparatively low-rent faux-preppy clothing chain that Old Navy would be if it sold button down collar shirts. How preppy is J. Press? Let’s put it this way, regular J. Press customers pop into the local Brooks Brothers when they need to pick up Christmas gifts for the servants. Constant Viewer doesn’t know how much money J. Press paid for this sort of product placement, but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn the store is on the verge of a major expansion and will be coming soon to a mall near you!
Filed in The Bijou
Thanks. From what I’d seen of the trailers on the teevee I suspected this was a bomb.
I think I’ll pass.
I haven’t seen the movie, but Bringing Down the House is a pretty good read. It’s followup, Busting Vegas is reasonably good, but, like most sequels doesn’t measure up to its sibling.
The books are, to my understanding, much more closely tied to reality than the movie.
Wow. I don’t know if the book is accurate either but (1) The counters are doing it because they like easy money, not out of any difficulty making tuition. Some of them wreck their employment prospects by wearing themselves out travelling and screwing up their grades/day jobs, at which point they need to keep gambling, but none of them start that way. (2) Many of the members of the gang are socially awkward and not particularly attractive. (They are also almost all Asian.) Part of what they enjoy about the Vegas life is that no one calls you a geek when you tip in $100’s. Spacey’s character (who is an unemployed ex-postdoc, not a professor) in particular is described as quite awkward and unfashionable. (3) The counters lived in apartments with each other, not in dorm rooms, so it isn’t quite as amazing that they kept the cash in their bedrooms. Nonetheless, the author portrays this as a stupid call, and the cash gets stolen and misplaced at several points.
It still might not have been the way it actually happened, but it is reasonable enough that it doesn’t make you scream from the stupidity.