August 20, 2021
10 Movies to Watch if You Love Blackjack
Before you sit down and log on to your favorite online blackjack casino, go ahead and rent one of these movies to get you in the right state of mind.
Movies that feature gambling have that built-in level of drama because gambling itself is all about risk. While some people may try to live their lives cautiously, that’s not very fun to watch on the big screen.
Blackjack is a great casino game for movies to focus on because it’s fast-paced with so many moments of tension. It’s also an easy game for audiences to follow, so everyone knows what the stakes are and how easy it can be to lose it all on one hand.
We’ve compiled a list of the top 10 movies you should see if you can’t get enough blackjack. These movies manage to capture the inherent excitement of the game mixed with the ups and downs of real life.
21 (2008)
Let’s just get this one out of the way. When you ask someone to name a movie about blackjack, they’ll probably come up with 21 off the top of their head. It’s based off of a real story (that was probably a little more accurately depicted in the book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich) of MIT students who use card counting and covert signaling to win at blackjack as a team.
Ben (played by Jim Sturgess) is a math whiz at MIT who needs to fund his future med school education if he can’t get a scholarship. Professor Micky Rosa (played by Kevin Spacey) invites him to join his small campus blackjack team, running the students through intense training to get them adept at counting cards as well as working together as a team to beat the house. Greed takes over, of course, and the rest of the movie twists and turns through betrayals, thefts, and a final scene where Ben stuns his scholarship director with the whole tale.
It’s a fast-paced flick with some nods to the complicated nature of card counting mixed with some of the glamour that everyone associates with high-roller gambling.
The Gambler (2014)
This one is actually a remake of a 1974 film by the same name. Literature professor Jim Bennett (as played by Mark Wahlberg) owes hundreds of thousands of dollars due to his gambling. He gets enough money to pay it all off, but he blows it all again at the blackjack tables. Things get far, far worse, and he’s given an ultimatum to have one of his students shave points in an upcoming basketball game at the risk of killing another student.
Jim is definitely a man who has gotten in too deep. Sometimes he has almost a magical ability to know when to make the right blackjack decisions, but then he’ll blow it all on the next round. It’s ultimately a movie about how far a gambling addict will go to fuel his need for his own self-destruction. The happy ending comes only when he finally pays off all his debts and has no money left, but he might have a future with someone he’s grown to care for.
Swingers (1996)
Swingers is a comedy classic with a great little blackjack moment. Mike (played by John Favreau) is still heartbroken after his girlfriend left him six months ago, but his friend Trent (played by Vince Vaughn) tries to get him back into the dating scene.
There’s a completely cringe-worthy scene in a casino where Mike is struggling the entire time while just trying to play a game of blackjack. First, he flounders about while trying to buy chips from the dealer. Then he realizes he’s at a $100 minimum bet table and his pride keeps him from moving to a lower-stakes table. And he can’t even be smooth about ordering a scotch from the waitress who comes by.
Next, Trent pressures him to double down on 11, so now he’s betting $200 on just his first hand. Of course, he loses. Then Mike resigns himself to the low-stakes table where a little old lady who doesn’t know what she’s doing manages to hit 21.
It’s just a funny, awkward, stressful scene that neatly encapsulates just how Mike feels in his life right now — off-kilter and overwhelmed — but he won’t (or feels like he can’t) back down now.
Austin Powers (1997)
You might not remember Austin Powers for its casino scene, but it’s a great spoof of the James Bond series’ numerous casino moments. Austin (played by Mike Myers) sits at a blackjack table to face off with the villainous Number 2 and his ridiculously named secretary. Number 2 has an X-ray scanner in his eye patch that allows him to see what the next card is in the shoe, hitting 21 on a hand when he normally shouldn’t have.
Austin, always a man of bravado, decides to go in the opposite direction and make a bold impression. When he’s dealt a hand that totals only 5, he decides to stay. Of course, he loses his bid. It’s a small scene, but it’s a delightful send-up of Bond tropes and hammers home that Austin Powers is really more of a spy who gets by on his charisma than his wisdom.
Rain Man (1988)
Desperation may drive the first act of the movie Rain Man, but it’s ultimately a journey of two lost people who discover a deep attachment along the way. Shady hustler Charlie Babbitt (played by Tom Cruise) learns of his father’s death and a surprise older brother who has received almost all of their father’s fortune. That brother, Raymond (played by Dustin Hoffman), has been living in a mental institution, and Charlie at first tries to gain custody of his brother to get control of the inheritance and pay off $80,000 that he owes.
Over the course of a cross-country road trip, Charlie realizes his brother has incredible skills at number recall, so he tests how great those skills are by having him quickly count the cards from a deck. Raymond is spot on, so he races them off to Las Vegas to take over the blackjack tables. Raymond proceeds to build up his stack of chips and even helps his brother out with winning, too. It nets Charlie enough money to pay off his debts, and it gives the brothers a bonding experience.
It’s the climax of the movie, and it’s one of the iconic moments that pop culture enthusiasts and gambling fans point to as a thrilling example of how you can make gambling look glamorous and profitable if you do it right. (Of course, it also helped promote the idea that card counting is actually illegal, which it isn’t.)
The Last Casino (2004)
Much like 21, this Canadian film (titled La Mise Finale in French) takes its inspiration from the MIT Blackjack Team. Here, it’s professor Doug Barnes who has been blacklisted from a casino for card counting and concocts the plan to use his students to win enough money to pay off his debts. Of course, things get out of hand and everyone tries to stay ahead of casino authorities and loan sharks.
The movie is less flashy than 21, but blackjack purists say it’s the better film overall. It’s a fantastic little time capsule of a film, with everything from the filming style to the credits sequence giving audiences flashbacks to Canadian TV and movies from the early ‘00s. You’re also bound to say “hey, it’s that guy!” a lot throughout the movie, due to all the recognizable Canadian character actors throughout.
The Hangover (2009)
Here’s another movie where the main characters’ fortunes turn around at a blackjack table. Of course, it’s a bit more ridiculous because everyone is trying to raise ransom money for their friend’s safe return after a wild bachelor party in Las Vegas where everyone got black-out drunk. Of course, it turns out that their friend isn’t even being held hostage, but that’s just all part of the wacky hijinks throughout the movie.
The scene is meant as a humorous homage to Rain Man, showing the otherwise feckless Alan (as played by Zach Galifianakis) as a sudden savant at card counting. Complex math equations float around his head as he gets 21 after 21. It’s a pretty great moment for Alan, proving that he actually is a useful member of the friend group after all.
The Cooler (2003)
Stories say that casinos sometimes hire employees who can turn the luck of a high-roller, and these unlucky people are dubbed “coolers.” In this movie, William H. Macy plays Bernie, the eponymous cooler at the fictional Shangri-La casino in Las Vegas who was hired by the casino manager to keep people from winning. But when Bernie starts to fall in love with a cocktail waitress, his bad luck starts to fade and his boss gets upset.
His bad luck (and eventual good luck) is an almost supernatural “skill” — he can just walk up to a table, and suddenly a hot table turns cold, and it turns out he can turn his luck on and off depending on if he wants the player to win.
Macy plays the sad sack so well that he looks like he was born to play the part. You can’t help but want to root for the poor guy to make it out of his drab life okay in the end.
Licence to Kill (1989)
We’ve already mentioned James Bond when it came to Austin Powers, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the world’s most famous spy himself. In Licence to Kill, Bond (played by Timothy Dalton) is on the hunt for the drug lord Franz Sanchez who maimed his friend Felix. His revenge plan takes him to a casino run by Sanchez himself, where he proceeds to win a quarter of a million dollars at a private blackjack table.
It’s a small scene, and it’s obviously orchestrated by Bond to get Sanchez’s attention. But it stands out for multiple reasons: It displays Bond’s chilly calm when gambling with obscene amounts of money, and it brings in a different card game for him to show off his prowess.
Previous iterations of James Bond had him dominate at the baccarat tables, while Daniel Craig’s later performance in the Casino Royale reboot showed him winning it all at Texas Hold ’em poker. Here we have a card game that just about any audience member can understand the rules for, and Bond is still clearly no one to mess with in a casino setting.
Casino (1995)
Here we have one of the most epic casino movies of all time. In 1970s Las Vegas, Sam “Ace” Rothstein (played by Robert De Niro) is on top of the world overseeing activities at a casino. He doubles the casino’s profits, gets his mob friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) to protect him and the casino, and marries dancer and hustler Ginger (Sharon Stone). Relationships break down over the next decade, between the mob’s influence and everyone’s own penchants for greed and violence.
A great blackjack moment comes when Ace catches two hustlers trying to beat the house by using a remote signalling system. He sets up a distraction amongst the staff, and then he has a floor employee zap one of the guys with a cattle prod to get him off the floor. It turns out the two had been hustling the casino for years, and the guilty party ended up with a smashed hand as “cheater’s justice.”
It’s a brutal, epic crime drama where everyone, from the actors to director Martin Scorsese, were in top form.
Blackjack in Movies Means Great Entertainment
Blackjack has captivated many players since its inception, and it has obviously fascinated movie makers over the decades, too. These 10 flicks take you along for quite the ride through the ups and downs of gambling as well as the allure and pitfalls of casino life itself.
Before you sit down and log on to your favorite online blackjack casino, go ahead and rent one of these movies to get you in the right state of mind.