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'21'

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BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

March 28, 2008

"The best thing about Vegas," says a character in the new suspense lark "21," "is you can become anything you want."

Freedom of self-determination is a lovely ideal. But when a group of smarty-pants college students from MIT invade a Las Vegas casino with a fail-safe system to beat the house, you really don't expect them to turn the Bellagio into a free-range hen farm or a recruiting center for Barack Obama, do you?

Instead, the neophyte gamers do what most Hollywood movie characters do when they suddenly come into a ridiculous sum of money: They go shopping.

So goes this superficially smart adaptation of Ben Mezrich's "Bringing Down the House." Director Robert Luketic and his two writers have taken an offbeat premise, thrown in a thumb-twiddling romantic subplot, a self-referential Kevin Spacey performance and a lifetime supply of flashy casino location shots. Given the potential to be anything it wants, "21" becomes just another post-Rat Pack exercise in robotic Vegas cool.

Hollywood's new it-boy from England, Jim Sturgess ("Across the Universe") plays Ben Campbell, a humble MIT whiz who is about to segue into Harvard Medical School but can't afford the price tag. When he is first approached by his charismatic stats professor Micky Rosa (Spacey) about joining a secret blackjack society composed of top students like himself, he shrugs it off: Ben is a straight arrow and would rather earn his way into Harvard by winning a coveted academic prize with his two science-nerd buddies.

In short order, however, Ben is seduced into Rosa's select circle and acquires the art of card counting, a mathematical system of determining which decks have the desirable high cards. Typically, Rosa's exacting method of calculating is rattled off too perfunctorily for the average audience member to take in; once they get around to the Vegas casinos and go into their little act of disguises and signals, we observe with a mixture of befuddled absorption and irritation.

Ben insists he just wants to win enough to get him through Harvard, but with filthy lucre comes the virus of hedonism. Pretty soon, he and his New England brainiac comrades are tarting up into cover material for OK! magazine. And Spacey's character degenerates into a variation on the army of acid-tongued bullies he's played that have encrusted into a star image and propelled him across the Atlantic to reinvent himself on the London stage.

Under Luketic's flaccid direction, "21" is another two-faced moralistic entertainment that shows us how much fun it is to live large, then punishes its characters for acting out our fantasies. At two-plus hours, it's way long. Much of the dead space is taken up by a boring love thing between Ben and his hottie teammate Jill ( Kate Bosworth), as well as menacing turns by thuggish casino enforcer Laurence Fishburne, who turns up every now and again to whack someone in the belly.

(2 STARS) 21 (PG-13). Brainy New England college students beat the gambling casinos at their own games. Robert Luketic's true-life tale gets off to an engaging start, but inflates into an overextended and predictable hard-knocks-in-Vegas tale. 2:03 (some violence and sexual content, including partial nudity). At area theaters.