> 21
Director: Robert Luketic
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Jim Sturgess, Aaron Yoo, Liza Lapira, Jacob Pitts, Laurence Fishburne, Jack McGee, Josh Gad, Sam Golzari
Rating: (M)
2 stars (out of 5)
Review by Christine Powley
21 (Rialto and Hoyts) is based on a true story of a group of college kids who used their superior maths skills to fleece the Las Vegas casinos.
It should be an exciting roller-coaster ride but unfortunately 21 decided to jettison the inconvenient facts of the case and create a sanitised version starring a sweet boy, Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess), whose greatest ambition is to attend Harvard medical school.
Surprisingly, he never once mentions how he wants to find a cure for the disease that killed his dad, but he is such a nice kid I am sure that is his aim.
Sadly, Ben is poor and it costs $300,000 to go to Harvard. He is finishing off a degree at prestigious MIT while trying to figure out how to raise the money for Harvard.
One day in Prof Rosa's (Kevin Spacey) class Ben demonstrates his maths smarts and next thing you know he is invited to join the professor's night class for blackjack cheats.
At first Ben says no. He is not that sort of boy. Then the lure of easy money overwhelms him and he signs up, telling himself that as soon as the tuition money is won he will quit.
We learn the group's cunning system, including hand signals so lame a child could spot them.
Once Ben has it down pat it is off to Las Vegas and the excitement of high-stakes gambling, except that 21 manages to make all that normally cool stuff boring.
Soon Ben is leading a double life: college swot during the week, fantasy gambler in the weekend but 21 drains that of any excitement.
The real set of college hustlers drifted apart as a result of the strain but that is too mundane for Hollywood so Ben has to have a personality meltdown, lose everything and then make a big comeback on that one-shot chance at redemption.
It is a story arc that might look good on a whiteboard but on screen it was trite and rather silly.
> Happy Go Lucky
Director: Mike Leigh
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsden, Alexis Zegerman, Samuel Roukin, Sinead Matthews, Kate O'Flynn
Rating: (M)
4 stars (out of 5)
Review by Mark Orton
It's a Mike Leigh film so that must mean the streets of London, right? Correct.
And it will be grey, miserable, and feature Timothy Spall? Wrong.
This time the veteran of nine features and countless shorts has kept the tenor decidedly colourful.
Happy Go Lucky is a slice of Poppy's life. As a 30-something primary school teacher, Poppy (Sally Hawkins) has avoided relationship responsibility and seems none the worse for it.
Best friends with her flatmate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), she endears herself to pretty much everyone she meets with her carefree ways - even if Hawkins' over-the-top bubbly blabbermouth can take a little getting used to.
It's inevitable that Poppy's manic personality and unflappable social skills will lead to a romantic interlude. While this aspect is nicely dwelt on, it is not the main course.
Instead, Leigh ignites the set with the incredibly talented Eddie Marsden (Vera Drake, 21 Grams), who superbly segues into socially inadequate driving instructor Scott.
Known to work with a flimsy outline of a script to give his talent room to improvise, Leigh has carved a niche through a keen eye for social realism, and his curious brand of kitchen-sink dramas often evokes way more laughs than tears.
So it is with Happy Go Lucky.
While the film is slow to get off the mark, the extra time taken in setting up pays off when Poppy is taken to task by her socially conservative sister.
Some of the humour may be unintentional, but you can be sure Leigh is mapping out the perfect assembly of emotional peaks and troughs amid the improvisation.
Happy Go Lucky is a fine addition to an exemplary body of work.
Staunchly committed to social realism and filmmaking in Britain, Leigh should have a good few odes to working-class life left in him yet, especially when he is so successful in getting his cast to fill in the blanks.
