This is one of those movies that watches extremely well for most of its length, and then in the last 15 minutes things just go down the crapper and you can’t escape the bad taste, even though the rest of the movie was good.

It’s about a math-whiz called Ben who needs cash for med school (why a mathematical genius like him wants to go to med school is never explained, but hey, most of the decisions I make would seem equally inexplicable to an outsider), and is offered a shady, quasi-legal opportunity by his maths professor. Professor Rosa is an expert at playing the card game 21…I don’t mean playing it, I mean playing it. He’s worked out a system where, using several people and code-words, he can predict the outcome of games and thrash Vegas for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of Ben’s math skills, he is brought on board as official card-counter.

Things work out well for a while. Ben enjoys the high life in Los Vegas while cheating his way to a sizeable fortune. But eventually, his misdeeds catch up and sink him, and so goes the movie.

The ending in this movie flat-out sucks, there’s no escaping it. Not only does it suffer from “gotta tie up the loose ends” syndrome where the film goes into frantic crunch mode and rushes through the resolutions of all the plot points, the ending itself is about 10 contradictions and plot holes supporting each other in a fragile house of cards. Take the escape scene itself, I’m sorry, no matter how much I think about it it doesn’t make sense. Not one iota. Watch it closely and it probably won’t for you either.

The really shitty thing is, the movie was fairly good up until that point. It flowed well, Ben was sympathetic (well, not really, but you didn’t hate him), the math stuff was intriguing. The retarded ending just screws up everything, though. If you rent this, hit eject when you have 15 minutes to go and make up your own damn ending.
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