What do you do when you're with a friend and her 14 year old son who hates horror movies, and you really want to watch "Prom Night," but she's paying and he won't go see it? You decide that Kevin Spacey is hot and you'd fuck him even if he IS 47 years old, so seeing 21 isn't such a bad prospect, even though the trailers left you lukewarm about the prospect of actually LIKING the movie. Or at least that's what I'D do, and what I did, and it ended up being a great decision. Do you know anything about playing Blackjack? How about counting cards? I'd heard the term before, but to be honest with you, I didn't know what it really entailed until I watched this movie. It involves a lot of concentration, patience, a good attention span, and a head for numbers. The college kids in this movie have to pay attention to every card played from a deck, memorizing the numbers on each card, retaining the assigned value for each card (high numbers are worth more, low numbers are worth less, and lowest numbers are worth nothing), and predicting which number is going to come up next.

High numbers = big money; big enough to stun a lower middle class kid from Boston who dreams of going to Harvard Medical School but doesn't know how he'll pay for it, a kid who spent his whole life focusing on school to the exclusion of everything else in the world. He's excluded the world so much in fact that on his 21st birthday he realizes that he hasn't really lived, and when asked by a scholarship committee what he's risked; what life experiences he has to bring to the table that will prove he's earned his right to the scholarship, he has nothing to say. It's a dilemma college students across the world can relate to, and not just college students but everyone who works hard every day and lies awake wondering sometimes what it means, if life is worth the living. The kid is eminently relatable and he drew me into his story and his struggle and kept me there even when I wanted to punch him in the face and throw him off a bridge (that will happen here folks... just because you have a 4.0 doesn't mean you have common sense and this kid makes some dumb ass moves throughout the course of the film that left me very cross at him).

That's right kids, danger! See, even though counting cards is not technically illegal, casino staff understandably don't want to see the same people in on the game so often that the casinos lose huge amounts of money, so they have methods of recognizing when people are returning again and again, winning enough to prove that they're beating the casino at its own game. Enter Laurence Fishburne, an old school specialist at "loss prevention" hired by casinos to weed out those patrons who might be scamming the scammers. Fishburne is great at what he does, but with new technology in place at most casinos able to recognize the card counters, he's becoming increasingly obsolete. He's out to settle an old score before he has to give up his chosen profession for good. He's a badass because he's Laurence Fishburne, and he's the perfect counterpart to Kevin Spacey's character, who is so slimy yet so smooth that you have to love him even as you hate him. Spacey is good at that kind of thing. We learn early on that he's not the benevolent mentor that he may appear to be, that he has a personal stake in what happens at the Blackjack weekends, and his story is revealed in small bits throughout the movie so that we
understand his motivations perfectly.

This here is what I'm talking about; built-in character development. It doesn't take long and it would have been easy for the filmmakers to do this with all the main characters, but they don't. That annoys me, Yes, there are... let's see... seven main characters? Eight? That's a lot of "woven back story" but it's not OUR fault that the filmmakers chose to have so many main characters, they could have at least given us SOME reason to care about the other characters, SOME kind of "fleshing out" that would have helped us see why these other people are even IN the movie, but no luck. I'm not saying it ruins the experience for me or anything, I still loved the movie, but it's a disappointment that the filmmakers choose to squander a chance to at least let the audience know why a bunch of kids would play such a risky game. See, they keep repeating over and over that there's nothing wrong with what they're doing, that it's not dangerous because it's not illegal, but we know that at least ONE of them knows better and the rest of them have to have SOME clue or they wouldn't have a built in system for warning each other when there's trouble and they have to get out. It's a complex plot and you'll want to pay attention to the screen for the entire movie or you might miss something good, if only a snatch of great dialogue, but it's not so complex that you lose interest in keeping track of a bazillion plot twists.

The film moves perfectly at a frenetic pace that keeps you on the edge of your seat wanting to know what happens next (even though I had much of it figured out, it was still fun to see, and that's tough to do with me... I'm a movie snob). See, I don't just judge movies by what they do right or wrong but by how much skill it takes for a film to engage me so much that I don't CARE about what it does wrong and I enjoy it so much I have a hard time remembering its flaws as I walk out of the theater. Perhaps if the movie weren't so slick and the dialogue weren't so crackling or the film hadn't employed such great actors into the lead roles, I wouldn't have cared and I would have gotten bored or let my anger at the sometimes threadbare plotting get the best
of me, but in the end I sat back and enjoyed every minute. I hope you will too.

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