Movie review: Cash out before hitting '21'

Could there be a more visually tedious kind of con game to watch than blackjack card-counters? Unless Hollywood gives us a tale of devil-may-care stamp forgers, "21" will own the title as the crime snoozefest of the decade.

The film tracks a team of MIT students using their math skills to fleece some of the biggest casinos in Las Vegas. Their elaborate counting system, the sneaky cues they use to communicate and their weekend trips to Nevada are coordinated by Prof. Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey, now more than ever in need of a comeback).

The teacher invites his brightest scholars into a hush-hush players' club where he tutors them in devious dealings like Fagin with algorithms. There's no law against card-counting, he reassures them. What he fails to add is that there's no guarantee that casino goons won't drag you to a basement and smack your face into ground chuck if you win too much.

Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), a cash-strapped MIT senior applying to Harvard Med School, is our narrator and guide through a schematic three-act rise-fall-and-redemption saga. Short about $300,000 for tuition (where are those Pell grants when you need them?), the guileless Ben signs on to the scheme. He'll walk away when he saves enough for his school fees, he insists.

Inevitably, though, the high-roller lifestyle sinks its talons into him. Ben rejects his longtime science-geek friends and trades his denim for designer suits. Worse, he begins a hubris-fueled betting streak that alienates his gambling teammates and draws the attention of tough-guy security chief Cole Wilson (Laurence Fishburne).

Sturgess is flavorless as the easily corrupted hero; his romance with fellow cardsharp Kate Bosworth is about as passion-filled as a trip to the 99-cent buffet. The film also suffers from serious gaps of logic. With Spacey's Rosa all but flicking a forked tongue every time he speaks, you'd expect Ben to put his piles of newfound cash in a safe deposit box. Instead, he secretes it in his dorm room's ceiling tiles. Pretty dumb for an MIT boy.

Robert Luketic, the man who gave us "Monster-in-Law," directs with a serious case of personality-deficit disorder. You never feel he's offering a significant insight or putting his own stamp on the material. His vision of Vegas is generic glitz, glitter and neon with no appreciation of the exquisitely weird folks who inhabit it. To dramatize the fateful turning of cards, he shoots them in screen-swallowing close-ups accompanied by "Ka-Thooms" that would sound more at home in a superhero movie. Betting chips swell into mountains or dwindle in fast-motion montages. For all the money swirling through the story, "21" is penny-ante entertainment.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186