21

This pleasant chill-out movie deservedly became a bigger American box office success than what it strived for. It is a lower-budget version of Ocean’s Eleven, bursting with youthful energy and music, and video-like editing combined with cool songs on the soundtrack. It also offers well-written and portrayed characters plus some kind of a wholesome message. In short, it is a little film worthy of a better three stars. (06/02/2008)

It’s a solidly made genre film, but it could have been better if 20 minutes had been cut and if a better job had been done with the humor. Kevin Spacey is standard, whilst Jim Sturgess looks to higher ground. The fine work with music and visual flourishes is occasionally smeared by unnecessary CGI, but the result is still a bit better than the most recent Ocean's Eleven. 3 ½. (06/06/2008)

Predictable. To make things worse, Sturgess annoyed me the whole time and I wished he'd fall into the depths of hell. Spacey was superb (reminding me of one of my teachers) was Laurence Fishburne. The moralizing at the end was like painted fingernails on a chalkboard, but otherwise it was well shot. Still, the fact remains that there are plenty of better movies about card playing. (07/21/2010)

A variations of Ocean’s Eleven with lesser known actors, a more “lovestruck” script, and unlike the mature “old-young” feeling of said film, here we have the aggression and unrestraint of youth. Unfortunately, everything is slightly dampened by the fact that, though the script is efficiently executed and good-looking, and tries to be very cool throughout, which is greatly aided by the city's periphery of lights and casinos, I couldn't resist a certain plot cliché and classically copied values. The question remains as to what extent those things could have been avoided in a story of this caliber. (12/13/2008)

The film is, of course, terribly superficial, and as superficial as it gets. The eye-pleasing cinematography and dynamic editing, combined with the seemingly "geeky" plot, are obviously meant to evoke a sense of well combined form and content, and to some extent it succeeds; the film has momentum, the cinematography is modern in the purest sense, and what is very colorful or very expressive is captured right from several angles. Even though my review is largely negative, I certainly didn't have a bad impression from the film, the actors were more than good, a minor amount of psychology was also present, and overall I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I was perhaps expecting something a little more subtle, some more escalated relationship between the characters themselves, but as I say – the result is good and the film as a whole is definitely worth watching. At least because it's still a pretty interesting topic. :) 3.5 stars (08/21/2011)