Screw the Haters, ‘21’ is a Great Movie

If you’re looking for a rainy Saturday afternoon movie, you’d be hard pressed to find something better than the Jim Sturgess vehicle 21. Set in both the gray Boston winter and the glitzy casinos of the Las Vegas strip, 21 follows a nerdy MIT student as he tries to make enough money to pay for medical school. As it turns out, the best way to make money in college isn’t working at a high-end clothing store, it’s trekking out to Vegas to count cards.

21 comes to Netflix today, and naturally, you’ll want to look around a little online before committing. But first, a heads up: the reviews of 21 are bad. As in, “this movie is a total waste of your time, you’re better off banging your head into a wall for two hours” bad.

21 currently has a 36% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it in the company of films like Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, and Nicolas Cage’s little-known flop Dog Eat Dog. If 21 is rated far worse than a Nic Cage movie that made $2,430 at the box office, it must suck, right?

I don’t know what the critics at Rotten Tomatoes are smoking, but I want none of it. 21 is so many things, none of which are bad: it’s a fast-paced casino thriller, a rags-to-riches (-to-rags-to-riches) drama, a love story, and a morality tale. And, to top it all off, it made the phrase “Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner” cool again.

What more do you need?

Sturgess plays Ben, a lovable kid from the heart of Boston who excels in his classes at MIT without even trying. Ben catches the eye of his eccentric math professor (played by an entirely un-presidential Kevin Spacey) and is recruited to join a team of high-achieving students who count cards in Vegas every weekend. As he begins to make the money necessary for medical school, Ben struggles to reconcile his old Boston identity with the many fake ones he uses while playing blackjack in Las Vegas. The whole time, Ben and the MIT crew are being watched by casino security who must take increasingly drastic (read: violent) steps to guard against card-counters.

The critical consensus on all this drama is generally something along the lines of “there’s too much jammed into a two-hour movie, and the twist at the end doesn’t even make all that stuff worth it.” Yes, there’s a lot going on in the film, but never does it seem like you’re lost. The love story, the morality tale, and the “let’s take the house” mentality flow naturally into one another, especially because Sturgess does such a great job of maintaining Ben’s floppy-dog lovability throughout the film. Along all the different threads of storytelling, we root for Ben to win, whether that means getting the girl (Kate Bosworth), impressing the people at Harvard med school, or just keeping the count straight.

As far as the final twist goes, I’ll admit that it’s not be the world’s most surprising ending. Everything that we expect to happen happens. Ben gets the girl and ends up on top. Okay, okay. But 21’s haters don’t give the film enough credit for wrapping up the different story lines in an interesting and not-completely-but-still-somewhat surprising way. There’s something to be said for a movie that’s moderately predictable but still makes you want to stick around to find out how things go down.

21 is no Moonlight, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. It’s engaging, fun, and just intense enough to watch when you have a few hours to kill over the weekend. If you’re really into it, counting cards can become your new Saturday night activity, too.

Where to Watch 21