Last night my wife and I went to the opening of 21, the movie based on Ben Mezrich’s book “Bringing Down the House”.   We were looking forward to the movie.   My wife had written a very positive review of “Bringing Down the House”, a book that she and I both enjoyed a lot.   She had done a great interview of Ben Mezrich, which showed how funny a guy he is.   And the trailer of 21 made it look like it would be a fun movie.

We were disappointed!  21 isn’t terrible.  It’s definitely watchable.  But it is nowhere near as good as the book, and in important ways it strays from the book.  Below are five reasons why I didn’t like the movie.

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You read the book review of “Bringing Down the House” here. You read the interview with Ben Mezrich here. And now you can enjoy the trailer of the movie 21 here at PokerMoments.

You might be wondering why 21 wasn’t called “Bringing Down the House”, since it was based on Ben Mezrich’s fun book of that title. The answer is that there is already a movie of that title with Steve Martin and Queen Latifah.

I finally saw Rounders (1998) last night.  It was a good poker movie.  There were, however, a couple of weak scenes.  For example, Mike McDermott, played by Matt Damon, is supposed to be this brilliant poker player.  But he looks pretty amatuerish in the opening scene, when he loses all his money in one hand to this guy called the KGB guy, played by John Malkovich.  Also, there is a difficult to believe scene when Mike McDermott and the Worm, played by Edward Norton, have a dialogue after both are beaten up for cheating.  Despite their bloody faces, then don’t seem as sore as they should be given the way they were manhandled.  

There were some decent poker quotes in the movie.  Here are my five favorites (all are taken from IMDB):

1. If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker. (Mike McDermott)

2. In the poker game of life, women are the rake man.  (Worm)

3. You can’t lose what you don’t put in the middle.  But you can’t win much either. (Mike McDermott)

4. It’s immoral to let a sucker keep his money. (Mike McDermott)

5. In “Confessions of a Winning Poker Player,” Jack King said, “Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.” It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can’t stop thinking about the way I lost it.  (Mike McDermott)