Takeoff from a true story, presumably far, far off, about a team of MIT math whizzes who, drilled by a Mephistophelean mentor on the faculty, visit Vegas on weekends to beat the house at blackjack. The film is not able to make the frowned-upon practice of “card counting” comprehensible, much less cinematic (unless you consider fast-shuffle editing to be cinematic), but then it’s not really interested in mental acumen and application, only in the rewards and perks: a run-of-the-mill Sin City fantasy (dazzling montage of casino neon, top-of-the-world luxury suite, strip club, stacks and stacks of hoarded chips) in which the natural-born nerd can forget who his friends are, become somebody different, go around acting like a cross between Richard Gere in Pretty Woman and Michael Douglas in Wall Street. Director Robert Luketic, whose lightweight credits consist of Legally Blonde, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, and Monster-in-Law, permits himself to be entranced by the fantasy, serving more as press agent than reporter, greasing the wheels for a smooth ride, picking compatible pop songs for tempo. Jim Sturgess is Young Paul McCartney cute as the whizziest math whiz, or in other words a fantasy figure from the get-go. (If he’s so bright, why is he piling up hundreds of thousands of dollars in the ceiling of his dorm room instead of in a bank?) Kate Bosworth is a still more distorted fantasy of the Smart Girl. And Kevin Spacey, who gets all the snappiest dialogue, puts his innate repellence to good use as the manipulative mentor, the adult authority figure who, in order to complete the fantasy, must finally be overthrown. The most sympathetic figure, even when (perhaps especially when) he’s slipping rings onto his fingers for a brass-knuckle work-over, is Laurence Fishburne as an old-school casino watchdog who’s being phased out by computer software. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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