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21
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: March 30, 2008

If you want to know what's wrong with the new film 21, you need only hang around outside the theater during the closing credits, and listen to the blaring, nerve-destroying, rearranged remix of the perfectly un-improvable Rolling Stones classic, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." To hear this seemingly foolproof resource of a song buried under some anonymous techno-junkie's remarkable feat of overstimulating tastelessness pretty much sums up the entire 21 experience. Here's a film about a brilliant MIT student who goes to Vegas to get rich counting cards. He has the ride of his life, but eventually is undone by his own arrogance, by his manipulative mentor, and by an aging pit boss who catches on to his scheme. Folks, this story is so juicy, there was maybe only one way the filmmakers could have screwed it up. Lo, that's what they did.

21 is filmed like a music video, those four-minute mini-movies that sell music to kids by fetishizing pop-star accessories with extreme close-up and super slow-mo cinematography. In this case, though, the experience goes on for two hours. We see giant playing cards land - BOOM! - on vast green table tops. (Five of clubs.) We see towers of chips raised like candy-striped city-scapes. We see wads of money, writhing strippers, and neon lights, all flung toward us or drifting before us or looming over us lest we fail to worship them while our eardrums labor and fatigue beneath a wall-to-wall onslaught of cranked, bursting, bleeding decibels. When this movie comes to commercial television a year from now, you may find yourself turning it down between the car commercials.

Too bad for the actors, including Jim Sturgess, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, and Lawrence Fishburne. They show up for work, get into character, and try to bring a story to life, and all the while they have no idea just how little the director trusts them to entertain us. Sturgess, in particular, as the film's naïve hero, gives a good performance that is ultimately overwhelmed by all the gimmicks and noise.

In any case, the story is so compelling, and the acting so capable, that I mostly forgave this film's stylizations for the first 90 minutes or so, and allowed myself to enjoy it for the unhealthy Hollywood Happy Meal it chose to be. Then the narrative pulled a fast one that cannot be detailed here, lest I spoil the plot. Suffice to say, it is perfectly fair for a film to withhold information from the viewer. But when the information is finally revealed, the preceding events must be consistent with the revelation. We should say: "Now I understand why he was acting that way," and not, "So then why was he acting that way?"

The fact is, the last half-hour or so of 21 takes several logistical liberties, destroys any good will it had worked to create, and exposes the whole project for what it is: a jerkoff director playing with his toys. Folks, I am the first to defend a talented artist for "showing off." I don't want Spielberg or Scorcese pretending to be amateurs any more than I want John Coltrane or Pablo Picasso pretending to be amateurs. Chops don't make an artist insincere, and anyway sincerity is not necessarily the same thing as artistic truth. Artistic vision and quality are subjects for endless discussion, but by any standard, 21 is a textbook example of skill on display for its own sake, without any meaning behind any of the exercises. It's talent and technology run amok, and the worst thing about it is: it ruins a perfectly good yarn.

Copyright © 2008 Theo Michelfeld