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21

A novel transformation
By BRETT MICHEL  |  March 25, 2008
2.0 2.0 Stars
21inside
21

In need of $300,000 for grad school at Harvard Med, Southie-bred MIT senior and former nerd Ben Campbell (Across the Universe’s Jim Sturgess) has left his robot-building pals to their virgin ways, finding his inner cardsharp during weekend trips to Vegas with a clandestine group of card-counting students led by smug math professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey, still playing American Beauty’s Lester Burnham, with an emphasis on ham). Director Robert (Legally Blonde) Luketic has transformed Ben Mezrich’s mostly non-fiction (and fairly non-readable) bestseller Bringing Down the House, adding mostly non-facts that include a villain (Spacey), lots of danger, a sexy dame (Kate Bosworth), another villain (Laurence Fishburne), and a new identity (including race) for Campbell (real name Jeff Ma). An Asian leading man is, it seems, too big a gamble for Hollywood’s myopic big players. 123 minutes | Boston Common + Fenway + Harvard Square + Somerville Theatre + Chestnut Hill + Embassy + suburbs
Related: Double down and Hollywood up, Reinventing the steel, Review: Shrink, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Celebrity News, Entertainment, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY BRETT MICHEL
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    You’d think Troy Duffy would have learned something in the decade since he blew his golden ticket with The Boondock Saints .
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    If you call a film The Stepfather , then your title character should have the decency to marry into that perfect little family that he’s predisposed to butcher and kill.
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    Let’s get this right out of the way: Carey Mulligan is the real thing.
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    Vampires may have taken a bite out of the popular zeitgeist in the past couple of years, but the nearly $25 million in ticket sales that greeted the opening of Zombieland, as it shuffled into theaters this past weekend, just goes to prove that while flesh-eating ghouls might be (un)dead, you should never count them out.

 See all articles by: BRETT MICHEL

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