Laurence Fishburne & Kevin Spacey to Star in new Blackjack Movie '21'

2007 January 20, Jonny Vincent

Laurence Fishburne is in final negotiations to star in the next Vegas-set thriller '21', which may begin shooting next month in Las Vegas and Boston.

The new Columbia Pictures movie will be based on the non-fiction best-seller "Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T Students who Took Vegas for Millions".

The six MIT students, guided by an MIT lecturer (Kevin Spacey) who acts as a mentor, devise a plan to 'count cards' in Blackjack, enabling them to get an edge over the casinos, and they subsequently take the Las Vegas casinos for millions of dollars.

Laurence Fishburne will play a dedicated, ruthless security consultant who makes it his job to track them down and catch them. The MIT makes his job difficult at first, wearing a range of disguises and employing the use of 'spotters', who are able to give the team advance notice of danger. However, greed and infighting within the team eventually lead to their downfall.

The star of the movie will be played by a relatively unknown actor, Jim Sturgess. He will play 20-year-old MIT grad Kevin Lewis, who was invited to join the MIT Blackjack Team in 1993. The MIT team employed advanced mathematics to develop a strategy to beat the game of blackjack through card-counting. Card-counting enables skilled blackjack players to know when the deck is favorable to the player. They then place large bets, which allows them to win big whilst the odds are in their favor. This method of beating casinos is legal, but casinos frown upon it, and will often employ brutal tactics to prevent blackjack players from using card-counting – as Kevin Lewis and his MIT friends were to find out.

Lisa Lapira and Josh Gad have also joined the cast of the film. Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey is also producing the film. Australian Robert Luketic has been announced as directing the film.