The cards aren't played right in '21'

(C) When the makers of the blackjack drama 21 stepped up to the table to place their bets, they opted to play it safe.

In this extremely loose adaptation of Ben Mezrich's nonfiction tome Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb have buffed down the story's rougher edges into an unconvincingly tidy Hollywood fairy tale. What might have been a complex story dealing with varying degrees of greed and high-stakes betrayal among the young intellectual elite in America's gaming playground is instead treated as a slick, glossy romp - one young man's wacky escapades in procuring tuition for Harvard Medical School.

Putting aside any disappointment that the filmmakers didn't find something more challenging within the material, 21 does have its charms. Director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) has made the increasingly rare two-hour movie that actually feels shorter, and the cast - given the limitations of their characters - is across the board enjoyable.

The inconveniently Asian-American protagonist (Jeffrey Ma, the book's " Kevin Lewis," has a cameo as a dealer in the movie) has been changed into the generically "all-American" Ben Campbell - who, with typical Hollywood irony, is played by a Brit, Across the Universe's Jim Sturgess. The working-class Campbell is a math whiz who slaves away at his studies, puts in time at a men's store earning $8 an hour and hangs out with his nerdier buddies Miles (Josh Gad) and Cam (Sam Golzari).

Ben's dad is long dead and his mom works in a tavern, so he's really counting on landing a prestigious scholarship to pay for Harvard Med. The $300,000 tuition is hanging over his head when he's recruited by one of his professors, Micky Rosa (the evangelically persuasive Kevin Spacey), for a crack team of similarly gifted students who spend their weekends winning tens of thousands of dollars counting cards in Las Vegas.

Though poker, celebrity and otherwise, has become a staple of television in recent years, blackjack is a little harder to play along with unless you, too, happen to be a genius with numbers. The film spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the methods Micky's team uses to beat the house. And even though their elaborate disguises, signals and codes are fun to watch, the card counting is not especially cinematic.

The team - Kate Bosworth, Jacob Pitts, Aaron Yoo and Liza Lapira - projects a collective swagger that is understandably attractive to Ben, but none of their characters are really fleshed out beyond a few running gags. Their fates subsequently carry little dramatic weight.

Similarly, Ben's ostensible transformation from timid student to big player fails to produce the rush it should. Laurence Fishburne, as menacing casino security consultant Cole Williams, is suitably intimidating, but the pressure that should build as he closes in on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gang never really registers as anything other than inevitable.

Gad and Golzari, as Ben's two pals, nearly walk away with their scenes, and Sturgess' interaction with them feels much more naturalistic than those involving the team. Even the dialogue is better.

Luketic deploys abundant effects and a propulsive soundtrack to juice the action, but the heavy reliance on style frequently overwhelms the film's slender substance. Scenes that should resonate with tension are weakened by the whiz-bang visuals, and what reads like a thriller in Mezrich's book plays out as melodrama in 21.

Related topic galleries: Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Lewis, Kate Bosworth, Hollywood (Los Angeles, California), Kevin Spacey

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