21

Kevin Spacy uses statistics to prove the moral midgetry of this ludicrous tale of MIT hotshots getting chumped by, who else, a black man with a grudge. I wanted to watch 21 because somewhere in that publicity flurry of blinking neon lights and drunk Massachusetters I read that the writers based its story on fact: working nerds from the east did fleece Las Vegas casinos--not their gay Atlantic City imitations, Slothrop--taking them for millions of dollars. However, after watching the movie in all its grandstanding absurdity, I did some additional reading and discovered that, no, nothing remotely resembling this story ever happened. Somebody once counted cards in Nevada, and he may or may not have attended MIT two decades earlier.

Which leaves the film abundantly empty. Abandoned by real life, its fiction seems short, flat, hollow, and simple. If something this preposterous actually occurs, you scratch your head and marvel at the weirdness and excess of creation; if some shortcutting Hollywood writers take a basically routine event and whore it up with fancy devices from revenge tragedy, you abuse them with blunt objects.

So: when crazy shit happens, fantastic, but when people make crazy shit up, they create noisy, indecent nuisances like this movie.

And who are we kidding? No random assembly of five MIT graduates can possibly look this good. Or be this Caucasian, even with the kooky Asian kid.