Last night I had nothing much to do, so I decided to watch Kevin Spacey's card counting movie "21" to kill the evening. But what happened was that "21" killed me! I'm sure you've heard the saying that sometimes you need to see a great movie twice to really appreciate its greatness. Well, in 21's case, I needed to see it twice to realize how bad it really is. There is very little of reality in the movie. First of all, the back-room beatings depicted in the film during the '90s went out of style in the era depicted in DeNiro's movie "Casino." That's to say the early '70s at the latest. Did you see the signalling between the card-counters in the casinos? How 'bout the sexy babe counter winding her arms behind her back to tell the "big player" a table was hot! Come on, gimme a break! How 'bout one of the team members getting drunk and then mouthing off in the middle of a high-count play on a hot blackjack table about Dustin Hoffman's character counting cards in the movie "Rain Main?" It's usually bad to refer to a movie in a movie, but here it was ridiculous.
But the coup de gras of badness in the movie "21" was how Ben, the main character, hid his $315,000 in winnings in a loose ceiling board in his college dormitory room. Of course it ends up getting stolen, supposedly by the "professor," Spacey's character. But you have to ask yourself, Shouldn't an MIT genius beating Las Vegas out of hundreds of thousands be able to figure out that a safer place to keep his cash is in a bank safe deposit box? Well, I guess not.
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