The movie "21" is unapologetic.
The Columbia Pictures crew makes no secret of the fact that quite a few "Hollywood" have been added to the film's script, which was "impressed" in the bestselling book, "Dulling the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions," as clearly stated on the film's label
The key word is not "base", but "inspired by"
Dana Brunetti, one of the film's three producers, along with Kevin Spacey and Michael DeLuca, best describes the adaptation of a real-life bestselling book and a major film, saying, "This is a fun movie - not meant to be a documentary. We made some changes to the real story to make it work as a fun movie. We set the movie to its current time and added a romantic element. But we didn't touch on the essence of what made the story so interesting."
And what makes the story so exciting is explained by just reading the title of the book. Ben Mezrich's intimate work took 57 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, selling more than one million copies during its translation into 19 languages.
The actual protagonist is Jeff Ma, whose name is Kevin Lewis and the name of the film is Ben Campbell. Ma, whose friendship with Mezzrich and subsequent book dealings are profiled in the story, is also pretty comfortable with the change in his life story as he moves from print to the big screen.
"Any time you have a seven-year window of my life, compressing it to 300 pages, then taking those 300 pages and compressing it to two hours, can change a significant amount," says Ma, who played a cameo in the movie as a blackjack dealer during a pivotal casino scene. "But there were scenes in the movie that were so eerily reminiscent of what we did and what we went through, that I got goosebumps. The scenes were fantastic at capturing different moments on the table and the tension we were feeling. It's pretty amazing."
The basic gist of the film follows the theme of Mezrich's book, directing spectacular filming scenes in Boston and Las Vegas into authentic casino scenes that will drain the gambling blood of the proudest audience.
Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) is an MIT math nerd who is invited to play with a blackjack team made up of fellow students and led by a professor (Kevin Spacey's character Mickey Rosa). The team uses a sophisticated card counting system to hit Las Vegas on weekends and lead the lives of strip moguls in general. Eventually, conflicts break out within the team and at the same time, casinos begin their strategies, led by a convincing performance by Lawrence Fishburne, who plays the role of security cop Cole Williams.
But this is where the book and the film go in different directions, and a series of rather unrealistic but interesting events help to end the plot with a classic happy ending.
Sturgess, who has previously seen in "Across the Universe" and admitted he had never blackjacked before filming "21," delivers what could be an amazing performance. The British-made actor offers a reliable Boston accent and sells his character as a geeky MIT student and Vegas high roller in his surreal life.
"Jim is a find," says De Luca, the producer of Sturgess, who had hung out with Ma for several months before filming the movie. "I think he'll be a major, major star. He brings purity, vulnerability, and a brooding intensity that he can turn on when he needs to."
In fact, the entire film is well-casted for providing hilarious relief whenever Ben's eccentric friends Josh Gad as Miles and Sam Golzary as Cam appear, just like Aaron Yu's character Choi, who is one of the members of the Black Jack team.
Meanwhile, Jill Taylor, who also plays for the Black Jack team and helps entice Ben to collaborate with the group, is the perfect role to entice Kate Bosworth, but her interest in Ben and her love is erratic and the ensuing fling seems forced. But of course, what is a Hollywood script without a love story.
And while many of Mickey Rosa's ugly acts and suspicious pasts are never fully explained, his character commands the audience's attention in every scene he appears in. The reason may be that Spassie's character is not based on a single person, but rather a mixture of real and fictional characters. 슬롯
