Cinematical brings up an interesting point in its discussion column today: is Luketic's new film about counting cards racist?
When I read the post, I immediately began searching the interwebs. I had been looking forward to the film since I first heard about it, but had not encountered any articles concerning the ethnicity of the characters and how the film portrayed them. Sure, there's always debate about how much of a film "based on true events" is accurate, but when race gets involved, things can get ugly.
"21" is about Ben Campbell, a young MIT student that ends up on a team that counts cards in Vegas for fistfuls of cash. In the movie, Ben is played by Jim Sturgess, a charming and shaggy-haired British bloke. In real life however, the man doing the math was an Asian-American student named Jeff Ma.
In fact, most of the team that Ma was working with in Vegas was Asian. In the film, only two out of five students are played by Asian actors (Liza Lapira and Aaron Yoo), and even then they are not the characters in focus. "21" instead puts emphasis on Campbell's flirtation and romance with pretty blonde teammate Jill (Kate Bosworth) and the conflicts with their team leader Micky (Kevin Spacey).
So, readers (and watchers), does it really matter? Would you rather see a movie in which the cast more closely resembled the real people or one that featured a cast of talented actors? Is it really that offensive that the film was recast in different nationalities? Would an all-Asian cast have simply strengthened stereotypes of Asians?
A better approach to all of this is to look beyond this single film to how Hollywood and audiences respond to all-Asian casts. I'm certainly not in support of the fact that audiences just don't appreciate casts of a different race unless it's a historical epic like "Memoirs of a Geisha," but it is a sad truth that we must realize before attacking films like "21." Clearly, Sony Pictures didn't want to risk a low turnout for a fun action flick by not throwing names like Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth into the mix.
What do you all think? For those of you that have seen "21," would it have had the same appeal with an all-Asian cast that you potentially would not have recognized? Did the race of the characters even cross your mind as you were sitting in the theater? For me, I focused more on the insinuation that most of the team was there just to test the tables and keep count while only one or two members (Ben and Jill) actually brought in the dough.
If the race of "21"'s cast was a big deal to me, I would take more offense from Luketic's portrayal of Yoo and Lapira's characters as sidekicks who steal and act like airheads than from the lack of Asian actors in the lead roles. But that's just me.
The true events of the MIT team can be found in Ben Mezrich's book "Bringing Down the House," but if you prefer the flashy and exciting account, check out the Hollywoodized version.
If anyone is racist, it's the producers, for operating under the false assumption that white leads facilitate better box-office results than Asian-American leads. They claim to have selected the best actors for the job, regardless of race. Ultimately, this meant passing over many Asian-American talents in favor of London-born Jim Sturgess, who required a dialect coach to speak American English.
Aaron Yoo, Ken Leung, Roger Fan, Parry Shen, Sung Kang, Jack Yang and Will Yun Lee are only a few of the Asian-American actors who would NOT have needed an American dialect coach.
Anyways, had the movie actually been any good, I probably would not have cared as much, but it was a really lame story with some tepid love interest and a contrived poor boy wants to go harvard med school plot. The "whitewashing" of the characters (even if no one cared about racism) is just indicative that this movie was set up to be lame formulaic drivel.