The following 21 film can be deservedly called being one of the best blackjack movies: it is based on the true story about the legendary blackjack players - the MIT blackjack team; the group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was able to beat casinos out of huge sums of money thanks to the usage of card counting strategy.
21 film saw the light in 2008 and was based on the blackjack book Bringing Down the House. The author of this book was Ben Mezrich, the member of the MIT blackjack team.
Year: 2008
Director: Robert Luketic
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Jim Sturgess, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Bosworth and others.
Description:
Ben Campbell is a very good MIT student who dreams to enter Harvard Medical School. But the problem is he does not have enough money to make his dream come true. He meets Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), a math professor who gathers a group of students to teach card counting, and decides to join this team in order to get money for study.
Soon, students become rather good card counters, and Rosa goes to Las Vegas with them to use their knowledge in practice. Ben and other team's members are able to win a lot of money; but the more they win - the more difficult it becomes to remember their goals: easy money spoils them and Ben suddenly understands that he has almost nobody to trust. Greed and arrogance become his best friends.
Moreover, one of casino security enforcers has something against Micky Rosa and wants to do everything in order to take back everything the students earned.
21 is believed to be the reason of the following fact: card counting technique became to be very popular among young people after they watched this film. Moreover, this movie shows many aspects of this blackjack strategy to be unreal. Anyway, 21 is worth watching because of fabulous Kevin Spacey's performance; the head of casino security played by Laurence Fishburne also deserves your attention.
Some critics consider 21 being the remake of a popular Canadian film of 2004 - The Last Casino.