Directed by Paul McGuigan
The Weinstein Company
3 stars
You may have noticed that the word “Slevin” in the title of “Lucky
Number Slevin” is not only the name of Josh Hartnett’s character, but
also a clever rhyme with the number seven. Seven, coincidentally, also
happens to be the number of bloody, noisy deaths in the movie’s opening
10 minutes.
It only gets better from there: after the carnage ends,
Hartnett pops apathetically onto the screen wearing only a towel, his
attire of choice for the following half hour. In said towel, Hartnett
will be kidnapped by two warring crime bosses who think he’s someone
else, get involved in a series of elaborate assassination plots, and
flirt wittily with his next-door neighbor played by Lucy Liu. Every
once in a while, Bruce Willis drops in to murder somebody with a pouty
face.
Despite the constant presence of dead children and Morgan
Freeman, everything about this movie is snappy. The names, for example,
are exceedingly snappy. Bruce Willis goes by the candy-bar handle of
Mr. Goodkat, and Freeman and Ben Kingsley are, respectively, The Boss
and The Rabbi. The dialogue is even snappier: almost every question
asked in this movie is answered with a snarky rewording of that
question. (Examples: “Why do they call him The Rabbi?” “Because he’s a
rabbi.”—Repeat 400 times).
Maybe the snappiest of all are the five or six bomb GQ suits Hartnett goes through after ditching the towel.
Don’t be surprised if you feel like you’ve heard some of the
patter and pop-culture references of “Slevin” before. Director Paul
McGuigan and writer Jason Smilovic owe the larger part of their souls
to Guy Ritchie (for flashback sequences with crazy lens shading), John
Woo (for slow-motion fight scenes), and Quentin Tarantino (for the
entire script and plot).
But in defiance of the laws of first-grade math, the sum of
all of these parts feels a lot smaller than the ultimate product. One
of the production team’s mistakes might have been pirating off of
filmmakers who are still making films, so its effort fails to stand out
among other recent releases. McGuigan and Smilovic might have benefited
from copying Tarantino one step further by looking for inspiration from
a couple of decades before their own time.
The filmmakers also erred in taking the climactic and
unexpectedly unique plot twist and unravelling it over the last quarter
of the film, letting out whatever steam might have been collected along
the way. Two other misdemeanors are a) continuing the trend of
crediting Ben Kingsley as “Sir” for lame action movies and b)playing a
rap song over the credits that summarizes the plot, “Mighty Ducks”
style.
The only thing left to do is contemplate the social
ramifications of a film that has two white males, one young and one
old, manipulating and being manipulated by an old black man, an old
Jewish man, and a young Asian woman. But somebody else can do that, my
work is done here.
Bottom Line: Two guys
plagiarize Tarantino, try to paraphrase so they don’t get caught, and
manage to hang on to most of the fun while editing out all the
substance.
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