Narrative sleights-of-hand make you feel as if you're the one who's just been had, and not the characters in the main con of this film.
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These days, everybody wants to be Quentin Tarantino. "Pulp Fiction" thrust such a long needle into the heart of the crime thriller that the genre is still trying to recover from all that adrenalin. And humor. "Lucky Number Slevin" is yet another stylish film in that new tradition, offering viewers equal measures of blood and belly-laughs. Well, chuckles at least.
If you don't mind narrative tricks, you'll enjoy this comedy-crime caper starring Josh Hartnett as the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mistaken for a small-time gambler whose apartment he's taken residence in, the freshly showered Slevin (Hartnett), who spends much of the movie in nothing but a towel wrapped around his better half, gets hauled in to talk with a mob boss and is put in the position of having to cough up the $96,000 owed by the guy he's mistaken for, or else kill the son of a rival mob boss. Walking into the frame from time to time is the mysterious hit-man Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis), who smiles wryly as he plays both sides of this mob war in the making. Morgan Freeman and Sir Ben Kingsley seem too darned nice to be the bosses of the biggest African-American and Jewish mobs in New York, but they clearly had fun playing the baddies in this fast-paced but convoluted tale. The real "heavy" is the style itself.
Everything about this film is slick and stylish—from the super-cool characters and dialogue and eye-popping backgrounds to the hip music soundtrack, and the jazzy camerawork. Even the narrative is stylish, with screenwriter Jason Smilovic trying to funkify the narrative by doing the "What's going on?" thing we all went through with "Pulp Fiction." The thing is, messing with the narrative and chronological structure is one thing, but geez Louise, you can't take back a narrative incident and say it didn't happen! You can't show people being killed and then bring them back to life again later! That's nothing but a throwback to the old O.Henry short stories with their trick endings, or the kind of writing that passes for plot on the sleeziest of soaps. That's the chief problem with this film. It pulls too many lousy tricks on viewers.
But "Lucky Number Slevin" certainly has plenty of style and interesting characters. Some of the most minor characters also end up being some of the most engaging. There's the almost obligatory duo of comic henchmen (Mykelti Williamson and Dorian Missick) who work for The Boss (Freeman), and "the Fairy" son (Michael Rubenfeld) of the rival crime boss, The Rabbi (Kingsley). Stanley Tucci also offers a nice presence as the police officer who spends most of the movie huddled inside a plumbing truck on stake-out as he tries to monitor Slevin's activity and figure what the hell's going on. The Boss's son just got whacked, and the cops know this could get ugly fast if they don't do something to prevent an all-out mob war.
Thrown into the mix is Slevin's neighbor, a coroner (Lucy Liu) who adds real bounce to the film whenever she's on-camera. The odd thing is, though, that she seems to have better chemistry with Hartnett when they're sparring and clothed, than when they inevitably end up in the sack together. But that's not the only "go figure" in this film. There's a lot you'll end up trying to figure out, and much of it doesn't get resolved until the Third Act, when we get explanation after explanation. There are some funny lines in this romp—like, "Charlie Chaplin entered a Charlie Chaplin contest in Monte Carlo and came in third"—but some clunkers as well. In other words, the plot and dialogue just can't keep up with the flashy style.
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[release]19283[/release]