Lucky Number Slevin

A few friends and I attended a prescreening of Lucky Number Slevin last night. Judging by the short description on our passes, we figured it’d be pretty good. The pass described it as a “comic thriller” and described the all star cast: Josh Hartnett as Slevin, the lead, and also Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Stanley Tucci, and Lucy Liu. I had high expectations with such a stellar cast, but I should have known something was up when I told a friend about it. He had already seen it at another press screening and said, and I quote, “avoid it like the plague!” I figured he was exaggerating and we decided to go anyway.

The film opens with a series of semi-interesting mystery-type shots: a man gets killed, someone takes a bookie’s notebook, another few guys get killed (one with a baseball), and a phone next to a bed rings. It was sort of interesting, it got our attention. As the film continues, Bruce Willis, in a wheelchair and disguised as a bum, wheels over to a guy in an airport terminal and starts telling him a story about a guy who bet on a horse that he thought was a sure thing, only to lose and suddenly find himself owing people money. When the man couldn’t pay, they killed him, and his family. Right away, it was easy to figure out how the people in this story, particularly the man’s son, would play into the film later. Putting this story right at the beginning really takes away from the pay off at the “twist” ending.

The next 20 or so minutes of the film are about Josh Hartnett, wearing just a towel. Now, normally, I’d praise a film for putting a hot guy in a towel for most of the first act, but in this case, it seemed a little excessive. His character becomes mixed up with two rival mob bosses and confides in Lucy Liu, who plays the kooky neighbor. She helps him investigate the situation and tries to help him and-big surprise-they end up falling in love. This portion of the film is actually pretty good. There’s some smart-ass dialogue that got some laughs and some of the shots are nicely stylized. I didn’t even mind the loud patterned wallpaper, which a lot of people in the audience found distracting.

The problem comes when they go for the twist. It’s way to easy too see what’s coming and the pace of the reveal seems to be off. The last 20 minutes are like an imitation of The Usual Suspects, but the build up is not there in the first parts of the film. In fact, I think the whole film had problems with tone and pace. It’s labeled a comic thriller, but despite some funny moments in the beginning, it is primarily a thriller and very secondarily a comedic film. There’s nothing wrong with that, but don’t label it a comic thriller. I think they were going for something along the lines of The Whole Nine Yards, another Bruce Willis film where he plays a hit man, like in Slevin, but instead of focusing on black comedy, they got caught up in stylized action and violence.

One of my friends remarked that it seemed like the whole film was built around a rather contrived and unbelievable twist, like they took the last 20 minutes of The Usual Suspects and tried to build a whole film around a reveal like that. During the Q&A session afterwards, the Scottish director, Paul McGuigan, actually slammed The Usual Suspects calling it, “one of the dullest films ever,” which alienated most of the remaining audience members who had not already left at that point.

Aside from little gems like “The Usual Suspects is boring,” the director went on alienating the audience with comments like “Americans just don’t understand anything,” and “I think the word ‘cunt’ has a lot more value than you guys give it.” At first, when we began the Q&A and 60% of the audience took off, I felt a bit sorry for him, but with little snide comments like those, I was left thinking, “You’re on your own, man!”

I hate to slam films on this site, because I believe that even bad films deserve to be watched, but the director’s attitude, coupled with the predictability and tone problems of the film, really put me off. Pass on this one, or if you must, catch it later on HBO or something when you’re not paying for it. I know if I had paid to see it, I’d be pretty bummed out.

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