Hollywood calculates the financial risks and rewards, and bets on cliché.
It would seem to be illogical for something to be both "inspired by a true story" and completely lacking in inspiration. And yet such is the case for the new movie
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, a boring, racist, sexist, moronic extended-length music video that plays-as is becoming all too typical-to the lowest human***image1*** impulses: power, greed, laziness, ego and, of course, the unquenchable desire for strippers.
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's script is based on the book
Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions
by Ben Mezrich. The game is blackjack, the method, card counting. As the historical group of six mutates into characters in a Hollywood movie, they undergo a few necessary transformations. The book's central character-Ben Campbell in the film-is, in real life, a wealthy Asian-American. For maximum target audience relatability, Ben is recast into a Peter Parker type: a poor, smart and bland Anglo kid with a widowed mother.
In fact, nearly the entire MIT team has been Anglicized. But for those who would worry about the dearth of positive roles for Asians, fret not, two remain. Aaron Yoo plays one of the lesser gamblers as the kleptomaniacal neuter, Choi; Liza Lapira plays Kianna, the other gambler who isn't qualified to be a "big player."
Kianna does double duty as a female character who isn't a stripper. (The other female who doesn't play a stripper is Kate Bosworth; she plays Jill, Ben's love interest.) Yet, oddly, in two separate scenes, both women take the chance to release their "inner stripper." Kianna does some recreational pole dancing-just for fun-and Jill presents herself to Ben's lap after a good night of gambling. If only Ben had doubled down he might have won a three-way.
But it's not just the characters that are squeezed into the same old boxes. There are
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's plot points, too. Poor-yet-brilliant Ben needs money for med school, so when he is recruited for the blackjack team by his teacher (played by Kevin Spacey, who seems determined to take part in increasingly terrible films), Ben ditches his nerdy best friends and their self-driving-robot-car project, and enters the exciting world of Vegas blackjack.
Of course, playing blackjack-even when counting cards-isn't exciting. It's tedious.
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's director, Robert Luketic, handles this in much the same ***image2***way as the computer programming of
Hackers
-with stylized, music-video-esque montages. Chips and cards pirouette through the air like Olympic divers.
Additional montages showcase the joys of newfound cash: sexual interest from others and shopping sprees. When all this materialistic joy subsides, a quiet scene finds Ben and Jill copulating in their stunning suite. As the passion threatens to surpass PG-13 territory, the camera migrates from the couple's soft-focus limbs to the view outside, resting finally on a fountain spewing foamy white water into the (h)air. Ah, symbolism.
As in many films (take
Jumper
for a recent example), after the 17-year-old suburban audience-via the protagonist-has been invited to revel in the hot chicks, the respect from peers and the unrestrained shopping sprees, it must be punished and shown that it's best to accept its mediocre existence. This punishment comes in the form of Laurence Fishburne, an old-school casino tough guy whose career of punching people in the face is threatened by new facial recognition security software.
At
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's conclusion, one can't help but wonder if similar automated software might soon replace the pesky, striking scriptwriter: filling in the clichés and calculating the mass appeal automatically. Perhaps it will be developed by the same MIT nerds who were working on that self-driving robot car.
