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There’s nothing less cool than conspicuously seeking coolness. And after a decade of Tarantino, The Usual Suspects, Ocean’s 11, etc., the calculatedly-cool Lucky Number Slevin enters the club like a poseur who slipped past the doorman.
All smugness and blase violence, this mistaken-identity/caper film plays like a joke everybody in the movie is in on — which, of course, it is. Like The Usual Suspects, its entire payoff rests on a secret, one which here is unfortunately fairly easy to figure out.
And if you remove the puzzle factor, Lucky Number Slevin is a movie suffering from terminal Bruce Willis Disease, where wisecracks substitute for dialogue and nobody with a gun to his head ever acts as if he’s in imminent danger of dying. It happens that Bruce Willis is in the movie, cast as Mr. Goodkat, a professional hitman playing two mobsters (one African-American, one Jewish) against each other. So the pathogen is there in plain sight.
The movie opens with Willis in a wheelchair in an airport lounge, striking up a conversation with a fidgety traveller and explaining something called “the Kansas City Shuffle” (which involves going one way when everybody else is looking the other). By way of example, I guess, he starts telling the story of a guy who once lost literally everything he had, including his own life, to a racetrack betting habit.
One violent story-ending later, we meet a traveller named Slevin (Josh Hartnett) who shows up to visit a friend, only to find his buddy gone AWOL. No sooner does he let himself into his friend’s apartment than he’s engaged in cute conversation with a cute neighbour named Lindsey (Lucy Liu), after which he’s kidnapped by a succession of cute goons on behalf of the aforementioned mob bosses.
The black mobster (Morgan Freeman) claims he owes gambling money, and offers to forgive the debt if he kills the son of his competitor. The Jewish mobster, a rabbi no less (Ben Kingslcute ey) simply wants his own $90,000 debt paid in full.
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The plot thus thickened, Slevin and Lindsey play detective — in between cute banter over the definitive James Bond and such — while everyone tries to figure out what Goodkat is up to.
Director Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park) does keep the banter moving, and knows how to artfully frame a shooting or explosion. And the supporting talent is substantial (two words: Stanley Tucci). Kingsley in particular makes the most of things, offering dark suggestions of Sexy Beast in his portrayal of the philosophic thug/Talmudic scholar.
Kudos for trying in a film that’s otherwise too cool to care.
BOTTOM LINE: All smirk and blase violence, you might find this a cool movie — if you’ve never seen, say, The Usual Suspects or any Tarantino films. If you have, then this essentially-predictable film seems like the logical genetic drift of a genre. Nobody in it seems to take it seriously, as if they’ve all caught BWD (Bruce Willis Disease).
(This film is rated 18A)