Average user reviews at IMDB rate the movie 7.1, which is a fair reflection of its strong, but by no means spectacular, merits. Indeed, while The Last Casino draws heavily on real life for inspiration, it also dares explore directions of freedom, raising the dramatic tensions and stakes, introducing more classical movie-fare plot elements and is overall an extremely well concocted and acted story.
While the real-life story of the MIT Blackjack Team is a hugely successful one, making them millions of dollars, this reviewer will refrain from declaring how closely fiction follows fact in this interpretation of those events. They developed methods of “card counting”, ways of keeping track of how many cards and of which value had been played from games’ decks and consequently increase their chances of winning. Necessary background knowledge regarding the movie is the history of the MIT Blackjack Team, a true story of how a group of mathematically savvy students from MIT as well as other prominent universities studied card counting techniques and transformed themselves into gambling prodigies. If you’re fascinated by the history of gambling and are looking for a slightly out-of-the-way movie that might have missed you by until this point, then look no further than The Last Casino – a 2004 drama, not without its comedic moments, that delves deep into the world of gambling and Blackjack in particular.
