21 ***1/2

Even if you haven't read Ben Mezrich's non-fiction work, Bringing Down the House, it isn't very hard to see where 21 is headed in terms of plot and character arc not ten minutes after the opening credits. This is your standard rags-to-riches seduction, a morality tale where the highs corrupt the marble faun before he finds himself again and re-chisels himself into form.

The acting, screenplay and direction were probably just okay, but in this case, okay was good enough. The last act got a little laughable, but since I knew where it was headed anyway by that time, the movie had successfully lowered my expectations, and I was primed to enjoy it. I wasn't expecting anything remotely realistic or original. I was just waiting for the payoffs and I was surprisingly okay with that.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Like Mezrich's book, the film is based on the true story about a group of MIT students who took Vegas for boatloads of money simply by playing a little blackjack. These kids had a totally unfair advantage against the big, mean casinos, however and they exploited that advantage like the vile human beings they were. They had brains and they dared to use them: by developing a system of counting cards, they took millions from these places.

I never understood why counting cards is illegal in casinos. What's the casino's argument exactly? You're not supposed to use your brain to figure the odds! They post odds all the time to lure betters, but gamblers can't use those odds against them, eh? Somehow, we live with this rule. But this is the story about a group of people who didn't.

Jim Sturgess does a solid job of playing the goofy, earnest American, Ben Campbell. He's desperately trying to get into Harvard Medical School but he doesn't have the cash flow. If only he can get that scholarship that would pay his way. Uh-oh, I think we have established Ben's need of money. I wonder what happened next...?

Kevin Spacey plays an A-hole primo here and it's a beautiful thing to sit back and enjoy. He gets to play these kid's seducer this time and he's great at it.

Maybe this is just personal, but I think movies about gambling are fun and the counting card element really gives the blackjack sequences some juice. It's one of the few things about the film that I haven't really seen in another movie before, not the way it's portrayed here anyway. This here flick may not be Rounders (which is near-perfect), but it's a hell of a lot better than Shade (which is God-awful). No, it's somewhere in between, but the kind of in-between movie you'd maybe settle on if you were surfing through the cable channels. Oh, this is the scene where the fat nerdy kid makes a joke. I like him. Now you mix in the MIT underdog angle and we're talking Chucky Cheese slices of merriment! No one's easier to root for than a nerd, especially if that nerd looks like Kate Bosworth.

How a movie makes you feel when it ends is huge for me. It can make or break a movie and for me it made 21. I'm not talking the third-act plot goings-ons. I'm talking about the last scene, the way the film was structured from the start and the way the writers chose to close the story. This one made me smile.