The following are movies either about blackjack (the first three) or with pivotal scenes that take place at the 21 tables.<\/p>\n
21\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 This 2008 production is the ultimate blackjack movie, the Hollywood version of the book Bringing Down the House and the evolution of the MIT blackjack team. Kevin Spacey is excellent, as always, as an MIT professor who\u2019s also guru of the team and Lawrence Fishburne is excellent, as always, as a head of security whose role harkens back to the days when the casinos busted card counters\u2019 fingers, kneecaps, and sometimes heads. The casino scenes are more realistic than usual, though the drama is a little over the top and the dramatic license is pretty loose. Indeed, John Chang, a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame and the real-life character played, ostensibly, by Spacey, says, \u201cThe book got about half of it right and the movie threw that half out.”<\/p>\n Stacy\u2019s Knights\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 A little-remembered and mediocre blackjack film that takes place mostly in Reno, starring Kevin Costner as the chivalrous gambler, who teaches shy and retiring Stacy (Andra Millian) to count cards. Stacy, it turns out, has an acumen for winning at 21 and she joins a group of gamblers to take on the casinos. After a homicidal casino boss has Costner murdered, Stacy and her \u201cknights\u201d exact their revenge.<\/p>\n The Last Casino\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 This 2004 Canadian made-for-TV movie looks a lot like 21, though it\u2019s four years younger; that\u2019s because Bringing Down the House, the book on which both films are based, came out a year earlier. A card-counting math professor (played by Charles Martin Smith) is repaying a violent loan shark with his blackjack winnings\u2014until he gets barred and his photo is circulated. So he recruits three students with superb memorization skills to play on his team. As usual, greed, interpersonal problems, and higher stakes than the students are aware of start to interfere.<\/p>\n The Hangover<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 In this extremely popular and acclaimed 2009 comedy (the second highest grossing R-rated comedy in U.S. film history), the first episode in The Hangover trilogy centers on a group of friends who travel to Vegas for a bachelor party before one of them gets married. One of the characters, played by Zach Galifianakis, happens to have with him Beat the Dealer by Ed Thorpe and, though unlikely of course based on any number of real-life variables, he plays blackjack and wins $82,000, just enough to pay off the mob boss who\u2019s holding the groom.<\/p>\n Rain Man\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 This movie won four Oscars in 1989 for best picture, best original screenplay, best director (Barry Levinson), and best actor (Dustin Hoffman). Hoffman plays an institutionalized character with savant syndrome who takes a cross-country trip with his recently discovered brother Raymond (Tom Cruise). When they stop in Vegas, they stay at Caesars in what was known as the Rain Man suite (it\u2019s since been remodeled) and the Hoffman character has calculating skills that allow him to count all the cards already played at blackjack. They win enough money for the Cruise character to get out of trouble before they\u2019re backed off by the bosses. But the blackjack scenes are legendary \u2014 and worth watching again if you haven\u2019t seen them for a while<\/p>\n Casino<\/em> \u2014 This 1995 classic stars Robert DeNiro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci playing characters based on Frank \u201cLefty\u201d Rosenthal, his wife Geri, and Tony \u201cthe Ant\u201d Spilotro. It centers mostly on the last gasp of the mob in Vegas and the triangle that developed among the three, but there\u2019s a seriously scary scene in which the DeNiro character picks off a blackjack player, a hole-carder (made unconvincingly to look like he\u2019s cheating), and makes an example out of him by having his fingers smashed with a hammer.<\/p>\n Heat\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 This gratuitously violent 1986 action-adventure flick is based on the book of the same name by William Goldman, who also wrote the books and\/or screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President\u2019s Men, The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives, and many more. It stars Burt Reynolds as an ex-soldier of fortune now working as a bodyguard in Las Vegas, who dreams of earning enough money to move to Venice (Italy). There\u2019s only one problem: He\u2019s a compulsive gambler. He wins big, then loses it all, at blackjack, but after a lot of blood and gore, Reynolds gets his gondola.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n