Despite detailing the true story of a band of industrious MIT students who learned how to count cards in teams and take Las Vegas casinos for a bajillion clams in turn, idiot Robert Luketic's idiot 21 doesn't have one single cogent thought anywhere near its brainpan. Another launchpad for British menschkin Jim Sturgess as lead-geek Ben (Asian in real-life, but John Cho was busy being Japanese in outer space), the picture follows Ben's rise as a Vegas big-shot, banging impossible crush Jill (Kate Bosworth) in a complimentary suite and becoming a magnificent prick in every other respect before suffering his fall (at the hands, sort of, of casino boss Laurence Fishburne) and discovering what truly matters in life. Find also Kevin Spacey reprising his role as Lex Luthor (and Bosworth the Lois to Ben's Supe/Clark), the evil MIT prof who recruits Ben and his coterie of alleged brainiacs to test his theories on the mean streets of Sin City.

A film that makes Rounders seem like a work of great seriousness and import, 21 is this generation's The Sting--and I mean that with as much ire as I can muster: it's a giant, sloppy, masturbatory mess spurred on by the same rage for filthy lucre as the characters it commodifies into stock types and flattened narrative arcs. The characters are smart because the script mentions it over and over again; their system works because the plot demands that it does; and once the filmmakers' imagination runs out, long about the five-minute mark (around the time our love interest makes her entrance hitting a punching bag), hurry and introduce a scary black guy with brass knuckles. If there was anything of value to the story, asking Luketic (he of Monster-In-Law and Legally Blonde) to take the reins guaranteed a thin, easily-digested slurry sure to rake it in during the winter release dead zone.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

Sony brings 21 to Blu-ray in a seemingly optimal 2.40:1, 1080p presentation--there's enough telltale perfection on display (see: the characters walking down a glittering nightclub corridor in chapter 11) to let you know that this transfer is at the mercy of soft, soupy cinematography. This may be the ugliest movie yet shot with the Genesis, Panavision's proprietary HD camera: director Robert Luketic creates a cognitive dissonance by slavishly following the Hollywood hack's playbook only to more or less eschew glamour lighting; of all the advantages that shooting in HiDef affords, it's inexplicable that he and DP Russell Carpenter should seize on its ability to register an image in practical darkness. (If verisimilitude was the desired effect, they succeeded only in looking amateurish.) What I'd really like to know is why green has been all but leeched from 21's palette, since Vegas--the city of money, after all--is abundant in verdant colours, from the beckoning Kryptonite glow of the MGM Grand to the palm-lined streets to the felt of a million card tables. As for the audio, it's rendered in tack-sharp Dolby TrueHD 5.1, and while I imagine it sounds a little more forceful at full resolution, the capped bitrate of 1.5 mbps is already pretty generous for such an undemanding, stereophonic mix. On another track, find a banal feature-length commentary in which producers Dana Brunetti (a dude) and Mike DeLuca perform tag-team fellatio on an undeserving Luketic. About the only thing I took from this yakker is that "the WB" remains a pejorative long after the network's official demise. Oh yeah, and casinos are fun.

Skipping over the BD Live features, whatever they may be (call me old-school, but I don't need to be on the fucking Internet while I'm watching a movie), the disc additionally includes three featurettes--in 1080p but curiously prone to aliasing--and a format-exclusive virtual blackjack game that actually lets you assign swear words to your player name, something Disney discs never let you get away with. In "The Advantage Player" (5 mins.), the main cast (minus Spacey) explains card-counting in a swift fashion meant to make you feel dense. Mission accomplished, though I did enjoy the brief explanation of Roger Baldwin's "optimum strategy," which over the years has morphed into basic strategy. Meanwhile, "Basic Strategy: A Complete Film Journal" (25 mins.) opens with a hilariously laboured account of how the story of MIT student Jeff Ma went from being a book to being a WIRED article to being a studio-hopping, homogenized Kevin Spacey production wherein Ma got to cameo as a dealer referred to as his white alter ego's "brother from another mother." Luketic and Spacey triangulate their mutual Kate Bosworth fetish and we learn that the establishing shots of Jim Sturgess riding his bike around Boston were given a heavy CG lift by visual effects supervisor Gray Marshall. The usual, in other words. Lastly, "Money Plays: A Tour of the Good life" (7 mins.) hears from production designer Missy Stewart (badly-miked) and costume designer Luca Mosca, both of whom discuss heritage (Boston) vs. pop culture (Vegas). A superfluous Blu-ray promo cues up on startup while HD trailers for Prom Night, The Other Boleyn Girl, Men in Black, "Damages" Season 1, Persepolis, Across the Universe, Made of Honor, Vantage Point, and Married Life fall under a menu-based selection of "Previews."-Bill Chambers

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