Book Finished: Bringing Down the House
I finished Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House last night, just six days after starting it. To say this non-fiction tale of a group of MIT students who take Vegas casinos for millions is a page-turner would be a huge understatement.
Starting with Kevin Lewis’s introduction to the MIT card counting team and weaving his way through stories of trips to Vegas, Chicago, and many other gambling locations, Mezrich keeps the reader contstantly wondering what’s next for the team. With insights into exactly how the MIT team pulled off their card counting scheme, the book reads like something from a movie script.
Speaking of movies, there is a movie, called “21: Bringing Down the House” that is based on the book. Unfortunately, I’m not likely to ever see it. I had heard that the movie was VERY loosely based on the book and after having seen the trailer from the link above, it’s way too loosely based. Here are some of the obvious problems with the movie that I gleened from just a 2:40 trailer:
- Too many white people. One of the keys to the success of the MIT card counting team was the fact that they all had some sort of ethnicity to them, be it Asian, Middle Eastern, or other. In fact, there were only two white members of the team and they were not the main faces of the team. This was important in that it played up stereotypes of these ethnic groups such that pit bosses never suspected them of card counting for quite some time.
- Kevin Lewis didn’t play for tuition money. He played for money. He never had a set plan that he lost sight of regarding when to get out of card counting.
- The woman crossing her arms and looking over her shoulder NEVER would have happened with the real MIT team. The MIT team went to great lengths to seem as if they didn’t know one another. Doing what the woman does in the movie would have gotten them caught in no time.
- Kevin Lewis never got “backroomed” in the book.
- Kevin Spacey plays the group leader in the movie. This can be taken as one of two roles from the book: Micky or Fisher. Mostly likely Micky, given his role at the start of the trailer as the head honcho. Micky was the investor who provided the money and guidance to the MIT team and never threatened Kevin Lewis the way Spacey does in the trailer. He also had a very clear role that Lewis was fine with.
- Kevin Lewis never takes over the card counting team until a big split of the team that ends with Lewis having a smaller, more relaxed-approach team. It was Lewis’s counterpart, Fisher, who had the ideas that seem to get played out in the movie.
It seems the only true things the book and movie have in common is that they’re both based on Blackjack and MIT card counting. It’s such a shame because the book completely reads like a movie script. There’s no reason they couldn’t take what was already written and turn it into a great, intriguing movie. Leave it to Hollywood to screw it up.
Next Up: Hannibal Rising (time for a bit of fiction)