Question of the Day - 06 October 2017

The following are movies either about blackjack (the first three) or with pivotal scenes that take place at the 21 tables.

21 — 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’s 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’ fingers, kneecaps, and sometimes heads. The casino scenes are more realistic than usual, though the drama is a bit 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, “The book got about half of it right and the movie threw that half out.”

Stacy’s Knights — A little-remembered and mediocre 1983 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 “knights” exact their revenge.

The Last Casino — This 2004 Canadian made-for-TV movie looks a lot like 21, though it’s four years younger; that’s 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 — until 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 stakes that are higher than the students are aware of start to interfere.

The Hangover — 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 The World's Greatest Blackjack Book by Lance Humble 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’s holding the groom for ransom.

Rain Man — 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 man with savant syndrome who takes a cross-country trip with his recently discovered brother (Tom Cruise). When they stop in Vegas, they stay at Caesars in what was known as the Rain Man suite (it’s since been remodeled) and the Hoffman character has calculating skills that allow him to track all the cards already played at blackjack. They win enough money for the Cruise character to get out of trouble before they’re backed off by the bosses. The blackjack scenes are legendary — and worth watching again if you haven’t seen them for a while

Casino — This 1995 classic, based on the book by Nick Pileggi, stars Robert DeNiro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci playing characters based on Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, his wife Geri, and Tony “the Ant” Spilotro. It centers mostly on the last gasp of the mob in Vegas and the triangle that developed among the three main characters, but there’s a seriously scary scene in which the DeNiro character picks off a blackjack player, a hole-carder (made unconvincingly to look like he’s cheating), and makes an example out of him by having his fingers smashed with a hammer.

Heat — 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’s 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’s only one problem: He’s a compulsive gambler. He wins big, then loses it all, at blackjack, but after a lot of blood and gore, Reynolds gets his gondola.