Counting Sheep

Ben Mezrich's 2002 best-seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions was a smart narrative about ... well, you did see the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, M.I.T. grad Kevin Lewis, who is described in the book as "a math-science whiz kid." Lewis was a new member in the so-called M.I.T. Blackjack Team, which, by the mid-1990s, had been in existence for some 20 years as a way for the whiz kids to suck up easy dough by counting cards in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. Their leader was former prof Micky Rosa, who, it turned out, was as much bastard as brother in the operation.

Mezrich's position was both enviable (he had in his possession a true-life thriller, the story of a perfectly legal heist conducted by high-rolling brainiacs) and a little disagreeable (he had to explain to the uninitiated how to count cards without sidetracking his tale into a math-quiz ditch). But he succeeded — with the help of nerds all too eager to share tales of their heroic swindle, one hell of a gamble pulled off beneath the unblinking eyes of the city that never sleeps, shaves, or showers.

21, the big-screen version of Mezrich's book, ain't no gamble at all — the thing is about as risky as playing the nickel slots with 10 cents in your pocket. It's as though director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde, Monster-in-Law) and writers Peter Steinfeld (Be Cool, as if) and Allan Loeb adapted the book-jacket blurb rather than crack the spine. They've excised the story's genuine thrills and instead filled in the blanks with blanks, chief among them a drab Jim Sturgess as dreary Ben Campbell, the newbie among the wizened ranks of card-counters.

Sturgess, last seen reducing Beatles songs to Muzak and mush in Julie Taymor's execrable Across the Universe, is about as far from Kevin Lewis as a leading man can get. All he's missing is the mayo for his Wonder Bread — though Kate Bosworth, as the hottest mathlete in history, would most likely qualify, as the two wind up a twosome and generate all the heat of two ice cubes clinking around in an empty highball glass. That pretty much sums up everyone and everything else in 21, a movie about Getting Away with It in the glitzy and glamorous digs of Vegas' schmanciest casinos that ends up joyless and a total bore.

Partly that's because it doesn't have the slightest bit of interest in informing the audience precisely how the M.I.T. Blackjack Team pulled off its scam. The screenwriters pretty much reduce their explanation to a flashcard primer that describes the team's system in code words: "Car," for instance, means the deck is plus-4, while "Magazine" means it's plus-17 ... which means ... couldn't tell you, sorry, because the central premise of the film is one in which the film has no interest whatsoever. Which is why movies about gambling seldom work: No one wants to spend an hour going over the rules, but you need to understand them before you have fun breaking them.

Which leaves us instead with the characters to consider, a forgettable batch of whozats and what'shisnames: Jill (Bosworth), the cutie who lures desperate Ben, in need of $300,000 for med school, with come-hither looks; Fisher (Jacob Pitts), the hothead hotshot in need of a timeout; Choi (Aaron Yoo), who flashes cash without seeming to make much at the green felt; and Kianna (Liza Lapira), the other woman on the team, who also doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. In fact, Ben is the only one who makes the team any money — which raises the question of how it's functioned this long as a profitable enterprise, given his relative newcomer status.

And then there's Micky Rosa, elevated from shadowy ex-prof to tenured lecturer and played by Kevin Spacey, who also produced. Rosa is the kind of character Spacey can play in his sleep — and ours, at this late date. He's the slick and kindly mentor prone to fits of rage, especially when Ben backseats his intellect during one tense session and drains off a few hundred thou while playing with passion — or as close to passion as Sturgess can muster. But even on cruise control, Spacey is a wild ride, the sole glint of life in an otherwise pleasureless film.