21 (Single-Disc Edition)
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.67 You Save: $11.32 (76%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.63 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of 21 (Single-Disc Edition)
Movie Review: very goood!!
Summary: 4 Stars
story,and actor... very good movie, i do interesting british actor very much,, jim sturgess.. james macvoy..orlando bloom
naomi wats.. they are great,aren't they?
Movie Review: 21
Summary: 4 Stars
A clever and novel card-sharp thriller. If you are looking for just a simple entertaining movie then "21" is perfect. You should definitly go see it.Movie Review: You can always count on emotions
Summary: 3 Stars
Many critics have found the movie distressed and compromised by the lack of vitality that should be excited by any movie that has Vegas as its stage. Indeed they do not overdraw from a tale that rehearses the usual rut of a good guy forced by circumstances to use his talents to an immoral strain so as to keep up with the rest of the world. The story is based on the book "Bringing Down the House", about the experiences of MIT student Jeff Ma and his team of gambling buddies, yet it deals with situations that both add and detract from the truth and the fiction alike. In the process of translating the narrative as a movie script the story absorbs qualities that feel jaded and ordinary by Hollywood standards, and the sensationalism of the story is depressed by the memory of Ocean's 11 and Casino, movies that have raised the stakes so high 21 flops by comparison. Not to mention the radically simplified version of the "cheating" strategy employed by the students, which seems to be so arithmatically feasible that one wonders why it does not happen more often. And by the way it does happen but to say that it is possible is not saying anything beyond the dreamy subtitle of a Vegas trip.
The movie does have numerous redemptive qualities, some of which have been so indiscreetly dealt with by most critics it gives credit to the theatregoers who simply discuss movies for fun and not as a professional happenstance. The movie has a subpolt filthy rich with a wealth of psychology that it is unfortunate the leading role went to Jim Sturgess. The star of the team of brains that "plays" the casinos is frightful to watch. This is undoubtedly the worst acting in a leading role in a long time. Emotionally he is a dud; his intelligence never shines through; his panache is invisible; his anxiety mechanical; and his attraction for Jill is melodramatic without the hint of affection and as if it were not enough, his supposed timidity is something we deduce more so by hearsay than by any true acting merit. If reminded of another Boston genius played by Matt Damon in "Good Will Hunting" we realize how bad the performance is. And he stands alongside Kevin Spacey, who is in top form as a math professor that recruits the students and schools them on how to take down the house. The wry sarcasm, the coiled irony and the implacable cynicism we have come to admire is delivered with taste as always. He elicits well the emotional farce of a stigmatized, pulverizing, insensitive, crass, demoniacal soulless leader that corrupts and avenges without any notion of a limit ever being entertained. Spacey is fabulous and Laurence Fishburne is far too good for the role dealt him, but as all great actors have time and again reminded us, there is no such thing as a small role. He practically takes over the movie. His struggles and fears, the demons of the past that haunt him and the vengence he craves as a anodyne to a tarrying heartache is impressive. His psychosis is balanced just enough to climax with irresistable loathsomeness, all the while rendered so vitally sympathethic we end up siding with him, to some extent, only to be reminded by the plot that we should not have according to script. And what about Jill? yes the genius gal who is second shafted because of gender by the math prof, she seduces the audience, even Ben (although the acting made us wonder quite a bit). Kate Bosworth emotionally composed performance fits well with the directive of her role. This film reunites her with co-star/director Kevin Spacey and director Robert Luketic. She demonstrates the maturity of an actress scintillatingly beyond the clammy classless fixture of her romantic counterpart. She admonishes Ben on several occassions thereby functioning as a alloy to his instinct and as a monition of conscience, which all american movies must support in some way so as to be rated PG-13, as this one is. Not a scene where she becomes sexy merely by physical disclosure, rather she is sensual because of her aloof poignant approach to rational stirrings. She evades close-ups, she dashes through frames as if by impetus and never loses the momentum claimed from the moment she enters the intricacies of the drama. She deserves a better mate, but the role of Ben is an excessively demanding character to do justice to.
The outstanding quality of the movie resides in its exploration of the reason/emotion dichotomy. The two spheres seem to be mutually-exclusive until we do indeed approach Shakespearean heights that defy any such garbled psychology. We are brought to economize the sentimental pragmatism that is required of such a narrative by tracing the vulnerability that such a distinction isolates. Please watch the movie again, those of you who've failed to illuminate this aspect of a trajectory that takes us card after card unto a universe where rational dictates are full force countermanded by emotional traces, and the two domains clash and clang to a barely audible cacophany that goes beyond the moral lithanies we often impose on the ethics of a movie. Here there is no such thing. We see Lady MacBeth, we see Iago, we see Othello. There have been few movies that have been able to unearth the benumbing force that these separate universes betray. 21 succeeds in this, more so than the book on which it is based. And the performances of Spacey, Fishburne, Bosworth, and not least Jacob Pitts in the role of Fisher make it a flick worth viewing. The last actor in the aforementioned list, Jacob Pitts, sidled into a minor role that is played flawlessly that storms about with thunderous energy.
21 has fertile layers, that if one is willing to explore, will yield a chill and lead to question the intellectual quality of emotion and vice versa as a proverbial Shakespearean drama has the stealth to do. And yes Jim Sturgess was legitimate in "Across the Universe", but here we have a star that drags the movies down while everyone else tries to salvage what it may.
Movie Review: 21 A Bad Shuffle of a Superb Nonfiction Classic
Summary: 3 Stars
21 is a poor version of Ben Mezrich's best-selling 2002 Bringing Down the House. The original story is about five Asian MIT students who walked off with $3 million card counting at various casinos around the country, beginning in the early nineties.
The movie makers have constructed a half-baked love story that isn't actually in the book. With the romantic intrusion, the thriller aspect of the original is lost. The book may have been tricked up a little. But 21, the movie seems bent on helping casino security Bull Laurence Fishburne keep his image intact and that of the Vegas casinos unblemished. Because the characters appear to be playing in real Las Vegas casinos, at least at times, it looks as if producers may have cut a deal with Vegas to soften both Fishburne's tough guy image and minimize embarrassment the Casinos suffered at the hands of the merry MIT crew.
In the book, the casinos and their pit bosses and security people were clods who never caught onto a thing for over six years. The movie hasn't got time for that long a wait. Fishburne is suspicious of lead Ben Campbell almost instantly.
Here's a major myth that grew up in the seventies that the book explodes: Casinos spread the story that once multi-decks were placed in shoes, card counting wouldn't work anymore. In fact, multi-decks actually improved odds for counting players by lengthening the period of time that dealer's hands stayed hot for players and cold for dealers.
In the film the MIT crew does all its work in Vegas. In the book, the MIT gang went to riverboats around Chicago, to Louisiana and Missisippi Indian casinos and even overseas to Monte Carlo and Cannes.
In the film, Kevin Spacey is an MIT math prof who spearheads the Casino Con and enlists his own students to be his players. A college girl is in love with the hero Ben Campbell. In reality, all of the players were Asians who wore disguises and masqueraded as rich orientals out to blow big money at the tables. Mickey(Spacey), the crew leader and organizer is an MIT prof and a professional gambler.
The movie constructs a fiction that Campbell only wants to make $300,000 to finance his education at Harvard as a doctor. The truth is the real Jeff Ma never went to Med School and never wanted to. Ma and his four fellow orientals who took down Vegas, worked the various casinos for nearly ten years and only gave it up when most casinos in the country had identified them and they could no longer play.
Somewhere in the middle of the book Mickey and the Ben Campbell character modeled on Jeff Ma split, and begin running separate teams in the casinos. The movie has Mickey (Spacey) fingering Ben and his team to Casino Security. That would have exposed Mickey too. Its absurd. In fact, though there was some minor bad blood after the split, it was in the interests of both teams to keep quiet about one another.
In the book, the players wore disguises always and changed them often so they wouldn't be recognized when they returned to the same casinos. The movie talked of disguises but Ben never actually wore won except once. It made no sense. In reality, Ma is an oriental, not the WASP portrayed by Campbell in the movie. It was key to the Groups plan that each week the players like Ma would masquerade as a different Oriental High Roller not recognizable as the high roller he had played in the same casino on another occasion. Ma'd have been caught on the second visit without a different disguise. In the film, one of the hand signals to tip Ma to the 'hot' blackjack table, was so blatantly obvious, no pit manager or security bull could have missed it.
The movie left two nerdy friends of Ben Campbell's lurking around MIT clueless about Ben's weekend table action. Those characters and the plots around them were lame. The whole college crosscut was so weak they might just as well have eliminated it altogether. Trying to merge the college weekdays and weekend gambling simply didn't play. Campbell (Jim Sturges) was supposed to have been half-enticed into the ring by his yen for fellow student Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth). But the romance seemed half-hearted once underway. The book knew better. The deceptions and nearly being caught by security time after time took up all the action and made the book a unique thriller.
Movie makers constructed a supposed collusion between Campbell and Security Bull Fishburne to get even with Mickey. The tacked on ending was so absurd anyone could see through it. In fact, Jeff Ma and the four fellow MIT students worked the casinos for nearly ten years and were well into their thirties before they quit. Only near the end of that time were they thoroughly caught, identified and forced to stop. I'm not sure any of them even graduated from MIT.
Spacey and Fishburne give routine performances as if they couldn't take the film seriously. I wonder why? In the washroom afterward I told two twenty somethings what a pack of lies the film was and gave them the book title so they could read the true story. 21 could have been a remarkable film in the hands of a writer-director like Dave Mamet. The film was market designed as a cross between Wedding Crashers and a bad Adam Sandler movie. A few of the six college students behind me kept mistaking ordinary lines as American Pie easy laughs, but the rest of the audience stayed silent.
The Filmmakers, who are not worth mentioning, destroyed a perfectly wonderful story that could have been a great movie. They doubled down in duplicity.
Movie Review: Glamorous does not equal better
Summary: 3 Stars
The story of how several MIT students were able to beat Vegas at their own game is compelling and entertaining. Unfortunately, it's told in a book titled Bringing Down the House not this movie. While based on the factual account of extremely bright card counters who devised a system capable of generating a very favorable win ratio in Black Jack, 21 delivers very little of that true story. Instead, it focuses on sensationalizing elements of the story and dramatically over simplifying others. It provides a glamorous but empty portrayal of characters who in real life were very interesting and intelligent.
Card counting, as represented in this movie, hardly requires anything more than an average IQ and the ability to count quickly, not the gifted mind of a top MIT student. Frankly, this has been simplified so that the viewer is able to grasp the key concepts; not a bad idea in itself since not everyone is a gifted mathematician, but they've gone too far and left the viewer wondering what, if anything, makes the protagonist Ben Campbell or any of his cohorts special. As portrayed in 21, it seems that anyone could practice counting cards in their basements for several months and then go make unlimited amounts of money in Vegas. There are ways to make material accessible to the audience without over simplifying it to the level of silliness. The Paper Chase is a good example of how to do this tastefully.
Over simplification is not the only issue in 21. Other elements have been made glamorous where unnecessary, sometimes with a level of implausibility that is laughable. The worst of these would require providing spoilers, but there are a few worth mentioning. First, these wildly intelligent card counters, led by a street-smart proffer played by a well cast Kevin Spacey, are always frequenting night clubs, sleeping in luxury casino penthouses, and in general drawing massive amounts of attention to themselves, all while purportedly trying to stay under the radar of the Casinos and their eye-in-the-sky security experts. This is ridiculous. Not even Lawrence Fishburn's entirely convincing and frightening portrayal of an old-school casino security chief can save this movie from dreary implausibility. Second, the interplay between the students are based on silly cliche. These same 'brilliant' students cannot seem to remember their own basic set of rules, or even follow basic Black Jack strategy when they are either fatigued, angry, etc... That is a blatant, undercutting reversal of what is supposed to make them who they are: an icy ability to calculate odds and stick to a system.
Spacey and Fishburn make the movie less of an ordeal, but they're not enough to save this one from itself. Some of the dialogue is pretty interesting, especially the interplay between the protagonist Ben and his cut-throat professor. The psychological underpinnings of the relationships between Ben, the professor, and the former premier card counter whom Ben has supplanted could have been a dramatic gold mine, but these interactions are left on the sidelines in a movie more concerned about driving the plot forward than telling a great story.
Overall, 21 is worth watching simply because its the next closest thing to the excellent book on which it is based. This is a rent not a buy. 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 because of Spacey and Fishburn.