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 (This may be a little rambling, but us MIT grads aren't known for our writing. Plus I'm still up at 6am after seeing the movie. This review contains some spoilers, so don't read more than the first few paragraphs if you want to maintain the suspense. If you want to look like a genius in front of your friends when you watch the movie the first time, read it all the way through.)
As a former member of the MIT blackjack team,
I've already been interviewed a couple of times
about the new movie, '21', based on the team and
inspired by the book
"Bringing Down the House" by Ben Mezrich. The movie opens
nationwide on March 28th, but tonight
was the Las Vegas premiere. Originally I wasn't going to go, since
I wasn't invited and didn't have anything to do with the making of
the movie, but I decided that I should see the movie sooner rather than
later so I'd know what I was talking about the next time I got asked.
The real "Mickey Rosa" came through with a ticket for me, from
a friend who got it comped (in true MIT blackjack team style).
"Mickey" also passed along a plot synopsis, which didn't give me
high expectations. Another former teammate gave a good review
after seeing it in Boston, so I tried to keep an open mind.
There were plenty of scenes that I found implausible, but overall
I enjoyed the movie. I worked on a couple of versions of my own
blackjack script with some friends (mostly Jeremy Levin, a friend from
Harvard Law School)
and it seems the writers had the same trouble we had.
How do you make the plot fit into the standard three-act movie structure --
particularly, how does Act Three resolve the Act Two confrontation in
a creative, exciting, yet believable way?
In the end, they borrowed a plot twist from other movies of this genre, most notably Ocean's 11.
However, they did it in a way that reinforced the team ethic, which
ultimately won me over.
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