21 or Bringing Down the House

Or a Pile of Crap!

Perhaps that’s being too harsh. I read what was a decent book last weekend, only to barely be able to sit through a horrendous film, negligibly based upon it, today. Bringing Down the House is a story that, if it hadn’t been based on actual events, would have been poorly structured at best. It was fairly boring in the beginning, got somewhat interesting in the middle, and ended in a non-dramatic, if realistic, fashion.

However, there was a lot I liked about the book – the high-rolling lifestyle, jet-setting across the continent each weekend, taking on false identities and raking in the dough. It was firmly grounded in reality, yet showcased a life most of us will probably never lead. Unfortunately the movie barely touched upon these aspects, failing to live up to expectations in an uninteresting manner.

The film opens with a flash-forward, something that has become insanely common since Pulp Fiction popularized out of sequence editing, in an effort to belay what is to come: a whole lot of boring back-story leading up to the main focus of the narrative. The book actually employed a similar tactic, and most likely for the same reason, except that the novel had pages to burn and a decent film does not have that leisure. Not to mention that in the novel, they were retelling actual events, whereas the movie artificially created the snoozer scenes designed to introduce character arcs that were entirely unnecessary.

The entire plot is conjured up without any homage to the essence of the original story. Where a good film adaptation succeeds is in capturing the basic concepts of the original work, while structuring it in a way that is more suitable to a 90-120 minute movie.

Almost none of what we see comes from the source material, not the motivations, characters or events. The same feeling isn’t there, the intensity is gone, and instead we end up with a film mired in long, drawn out sequences in Boston interspersed with cookie-cutter scenes in Las Vegas.

I wanted to see the book take on a new life on film – as I mentioned before, the book was relatively boring at parts. I expected to see the story jazzed up a bit, made more entertaining. Unfortunately, this entirely failed to happen. The acting was decent, the directing okay, but the screenplay – oy vey.

Everything that was both nostalgic and refreshing about The Darjeeling Limited, which I watched yesterday, this film was lacking. The story was uninspiring, uninteresting and unoriginal. The dialogue and revelation was painfully on-the-nose – most of it as if the creators were pandering to unintelligent cavemen.

Although it has certainly come a long way, the video cinematography was non-purposeful, jarring and blurry, unnecessarily lacking that artistic appeal. Not since Attack of the Clones have I so longingly looked at the exit door.