I love
Blackjack and I love
Las Vegas and
21 is the best of both worlds for me. Just like the Prison Genre flicks, I'm a sucker for any and all things that deal with C a s i n o s in movies.
21 is a great retelling of the legendary MIT team that took on
Vegas with their revolutionary system of card counting, turning it into a true science with teamwork. The one thing their system wasn't was infallible and the one thing that could have been fixed. Greed and Jealousy. It's that human element that makes any system like this eventually fail. With the bright lights and dollar signs dancing in your eyes, greed will always take a player down. Infighting and jealousy of wanting to be top dog is the other downfall. You get use to the lifestyle and suddenly you can't give that up and will do anything to keep it going, thus the bets start getting higher and suddenly you're risking it all for the quick score rather than sticking to what worked and got you there in the first place.
21 has a couple of good things going for the movie besides the subject matter. It's got
Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne and
Kevin Spacey. The film does a great job of immersing yourself into the lifestyle and showing just how seductive
Sin City and money can be. I found myself at times just itching to go back to
Vegas because I'm familiar with a lot of the locations they used throughout the shoot. It's been awhile since I last watched 21 and certainly long before
Fishburne joined
CSI. So, with him already departed from the series, it was kinda trippy to see him back in Vegas. Definitely worth a
Rent whether your a fan of card games, Vegas or the actors. It's very entertaining and will have you on the edge of your seat as you wait to see what happens next. The one thing you need to know about the film is that it's based on the team and does take some liberties with facts for the purpose of making it more accessible within the Hollywood system. Other than that, it's a good movie.
4 Stars out of 5.