Savvy moviegoers know that very few films reporting to be “based on a true story” are actually real or accurate. Hollywood likes to dramatize whatever nonfiction it gets its hands on. It’s tradition. And here, with “21“, we have Hollywood doing its very best dress-up job, complete with all the standard plot devices and dramatic accessories.

The film is loosely based on the best-selling novel “Bringing Down The House” by Ben Mezrich, which itself is loosely based on real events of the MIT Blackjack Team. After a couple degrees of separation one wonders how much the film resembles the source material.

If there’s a flaw with “21″ it comes in the form of a fairly generic script that follows the standard plot points required of such films. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, in the film, the main character, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) joins the Blackjack team because he needs to come up with $300,000 to pay for Harvard Medical School. In reality, Jeff Ma, the player whom Ben is based on, got involved because he thought it would be “fun”. There is no denying that the Hollywood version provides a bit more drama.

But while the film is pedestrian in terms of plot, it still works, for two reasons in particular. The first reason is because of all the smaller moments that ring true given a person in that situation. As Jeff Ma explained in an interview on Ain’t It Cool News:

…the transformation that Jim goes through from being a nerdy MIT guy to all of a sudden being able to land Kate Bosworth as his girlfriend… That was something that definitely happened to me through the blackjack experience, where I became much more confident in what I was doing. The first scene where they fly into Vegas and he looks out the window and sees the lights and everything like that, that was a feeling I certainly remember. That one scene where he is lying in bed and he calls and tries to get room service and he’s in his dorm room, not a hotel… Those kinds of things just happened all of the time, because of the craziness and sort of duality of our lives.

The other reason the film works is because of the strategy used by the MIT team.

Counting cards is not illegal. It is, however, frowned upon by casinos, for obvious reasons. And because casinos are private property in Las Vegas, gamblers can be asked to leave, and must do so or face trespassing charges. We learn from the film that the really difficult part of card counting is not the actual mathematics; anyone with reasonable math skills can practice it and get good. The real difficulty of the system lies in avoiding detection. For this reason “teams” are employed, which consist of various members, mainly “spotters” and big bettors. The team members work together to detect when a table is “hot”; that is, when the odds are in the players’ favor. The spotter’s job is to bet the minimum at all times and look inconspicuous while keeping track of “the count”, then signal the big bettor when the table’s count is in their favor. The bettors job is to come in and bet huge sums of money. Together, a successful team remaining undetected can rake in thousands of dollars in a weekend.

Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne do an admirable job with roles that are pretty thin. Overall the film is shot well and the acting is fair. It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it does manage to be entertaining throughout.

Savvy moviegoers know that very few films reporting to be “based on a true story” are actually real or accurate. Hollywood likes to dramatize whatever nonfiction it gets its hands on. It’s tradition. And here, with “21“, we have Hollywood doing its very best dress-up job, complete with all the standard plot devices and dramatic accessories.

The film is loosely based on the best-selling novel “Bringing Down The House” by Ben Mezrich, which itself is loosely based on real events of the MIT Blackjack Team. After a couple degrees of separation one wonders how much the film resembles the source material.

If there’s a flaw with “21″ it comes in the form of a fairly generic script that follows the standard plot points required of such films. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, in the film, the main character, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) joins the Blackjack team because he needs to come up with $300,000 to pay for Harvard Medical School. In reality, Jeff Ma, the player whom Ben is based on, got involved because he thought it would be “fun”. There is no denying that the Hollywood version provides a bit more drama.

But while the film is pedestrian in terms of plot, it still works, for two reasons in particular. The first reason is because of all the smaller moments that ring true given a person in that situation. As Jeff Ma explained in an interview on Ain’t It Cool News:

…the transformation that Jim goes through from being a nerdy MIT guy to all of a sudden being able to land Kate Bosworth as his girlfriend… That was something that definitely happened to me through the blackjack experience, where I became much more confident in what I was doing. The first scene where they fly into Vegas and he looks out the window and sees the lights and everything like that, that was a feeling I certainly remember. That one scene where he is lying in bed and he calls and tries to get room service and he’s in his dorm room, not a hotel… Those kinds of things just happened all of the time, because of the craziness and sort of duality of our lives.

The other reason the film works is because of the strategy used by the MIT team.

Counting cards is not illegal. It is, however, frowned upon by casinos, for obvious reasons. And because casinos are private property in Las Vegas, gamblers can be asked to leave, and must do so or face trespassing charges. We learn from the film that the really difficult part of card counting is not the actual mathematics; anyone with reasonable math skills can practice it and get good. The real difficulty of the system lies in avoiding detection. For this reason “teams” are employed, which consist of various members, mainly “spotters” and big bettors. The team members work together to detect when a table is “hot”; that is, when the odds are in the players’ favor. The spotter’s job is to bet the minimum at all times and look inconspicuous while keeping track of “the count”, then signal the big bettor when the table’s count is in their favor. The bettors job is to come in and bet huge sums of money. Together, a successful team remaining undetected can rake in thousands of dollars in a weekend.

Kevin Spacey and Laurence Fishburne do an admirable job with roles that are pretty thin. Overall the film is shot well and the acting is fair. It’s not a great movie by any stretch, but it does manage to be entertaining throughout.