'Bad' guys and gals up the ante

The Video Guy

By Elliott Smith | For The Olympian • Published August 14, 2008

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Anti-heroes, bad boys and ne'er-do-wells always have been the kind of characters that grab our attention.

Through the years, they have gone from being fringe characters to leads in the majority of films released.

Why? Because it's much more fun to imagine ourselves as the "bad" guy or girl doing things rather than some milquetoast person who passively watches the action.

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Flying home from Las Vegas a few weeks ago, I decided to buy "Bringing Down The House" to read on the flight. It's a perfectly good airport book that doesn't require a lot of effort to finish.

On the other hand, watching 21 (PG-13 .1/2) is a chore -- the kind of movie that if you were to watch it on the plane, you'd be searching for the exit. None of the intrigue in the book about MIT-trained card counters is present. It's instead been replaced with generic cliches that make it entirely too predictable.

I know the book always is better than the movie, but some of the curious choices make things even worse. First off, changing the race of the characters from Asian to (mostly) white eliminates a key piece of the strategy in the true-life tale: the fact that the players' indeterminate race made them easier to avoid detection.

Jim Sturgess -- fighting his British accent all the way -- stars as Ben, a brainy senior recruited by his college professor (Kevin Spacey) to join a super-secret club of card counters that uses math skills to beat the house at blackjack in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

In the book, the Ben character is a normal kid who decides to join the crew for kicks. Of course, that's not "heroic" enough, even for an anti-hero, so in the film he's been recast as a poor kid trying to earn money for medical school instead of going into debt like the rest of us.

Of course, Ben can't even enjoy his bad-boy status. The story arc finds him living the high life, forgetting about his old friends, and angering other members of his team with his mad skills.

It all gets so ridiculous, with Laurence Fishburne showing up as a punch-happy heavy and the crew wearing insane costumes. Any visceral thrill of the scheme devolves into silliness generally reserved for Circus Circus.