***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu
screenplay by Jason Smilovic
directed by Paul McGuigan
by Walter Chaw I wonder if it's not ultimately a little too pat for its own good, but Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number Slevin is another slick, Guy Ritchie crime-manqué to pair with the director's breakthrough Gangster No. 1. It stars his muse Josh Hartnett (great in McGuigan's underestimated Hitchcock shrine Wicker Park) as the handsome Roger O. Thornhill/Wrong Man archetype–and it finds for Lucy Liu the first role that didn't make me sort of want to punch her mother. But the real star of a film that finds supporting roles for Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Stanley Tucci, and Sir Ben Kingsley is McGuigan's restless camerawork: an intricate lattice of matching shots and glittering surfaces that becomes almost an impressionistic projection of the mad, labyrinthine interiority of a mind bent on vengeance. Flashbacks and CGI-aided swoops and zooms are woven into the picture's visual tapestry, so that Lucky Number Slevin is read best as a lurid, comic-book send-up of a genre–every scene is played with a good-natured nudge, and when it overstays its welcome with a round-up that verges on sickly, its only real crime is that it's less a grotesque than a screwball romance. Hitchcock did it like that sometimes, too.
Slevin (Hartnett) is mistaken for a friend he's visiting–a friend in deep with crime lords Boss (Freeman) and Rabbi (Kingsley), leading to a few congenially-violent meetings in their facing glass high-rises, kings in conflict in castles sharing the same thoroughfare moat. Boss and Rabbi have both hired killer Goodkat (Willis)–one to kill the other's son, the other to kill the other to prevent the murder of said son, Fairy (Corey Stall), so named because he is, of course, gay. Slevin has a twice-broken nose and a fondness for argyle sweater vests and the Asian-coroner neighbour, Lindsey (Liu), of his missing pal. But there's more: a flashback where a guy and his whole family are wiped-out after he bets on a fixed horse race and loses more than he can afford to lose; some inconsistencies in Slevin's story about his first broken nose; and then the Jew jokes and the fag jokes and the black jokes and Goodkat in a wheelchair and twists and contortions. So many convoluted avenues, in fact, that it both wears you down and announces itself in blazing neon as a beast that understands its prey enough to craft a pretty fair facsimile of it from itself on its way to excess.
It might be too kind an assessment of the picture on its own, but looking back on McGuigan's films, there's a trend emerging of romantic movies flowering out of masculine genres to be explored in his punk depeche modes. Lucky Number Slevin displaces as a throwback and a pomo in the same way that Kevin Williamson's scripts used to–the way that Joss Whedon's seem to, now. You either spend all your time or none of it trying to follow it–both tactics resulting in the same kind of involved junk appreciation to which genre seems to always aspire and only rarely achieve. The focus on errata is the stuff of which cults are made, after all. A number of critics have compared screenwriter Jason Smilovic's pop references to Tarantino's (foreplay herein involves the tangle of actors portraying Bond and Blofeld), but they strike me more as a pastiche of Tarantino, just as the rest of the picture plays as commentary beneath mod British gangster flicks and the more operatic of the films noir. It's not a sophisticated film, it's a sarcastic one–which is not to say that it's without sophistication, but rather that all of its bramble is MacGuffin, and the real interest here is in the relationship between Slevin and Lindsey (and Slevin and his mystery dad), making Lucky Number Slevin a witty little lark about a boy completing his Oedipal split–and falling in love in the process. Originally published: April 7, 2006.
by Bill Chambers Genius presents Lucky Number Slevin on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions; we received the former for review. The 2.40:1, 16×9-enhanced image is richly detailed even though the film very obviously went through a digital cheese grater in post. From the jaundiced flesh tones I'm surprised this isn't a Universal disc, but neither they nor some light edge-enhancement stop this from being the best-looking Weinstein title to date. The accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is less problematic, though the mix itself is a bit schizophrenic, totally immersive one minute and unremarkable the next. Dialogue is crisp and firmly anchored in the centre channel. Two film-length commentaries also adorn the platter, the first with director Paul McGuigan (still Scottish, still unintelligible); shame he wasn't paired with Josh Hartnett, as their yak-track for Wicker Park is pretty good. That said, Hartnett does appear on the second yakker with Lucy Liu and screenwriter Jason Smilovic, the latter of whom was shoehorned in after-the-fact and evidently privy to Hartnett & Liu's side of the conversation, as he sometimes clarifies something they just said. While McGuigan is mostly interested in defending his aesthetic choices, Hartnett, et al are all about admiring the décor.
Video-based extras begin with four deleted scenes–actually it's more like twelve, but like elisions are grouped into blocks–totalling 21 minutes; three of these feature optional commentary from McGuigan. Black henchmen Elvis and Sloe were evidently much more prominent in the rough cut, and if all of their stuff is pretty funny, one has to consciously choose to ignore that they're racist caricatures. (Even McGuigan steers clear of this particular elephant in the room.) An alternate ending of sorts is indeed, as McGuigan puts it, "dark," but I have a hard time believing it was ever seriously considered for inclusion. Meanwhile, "Making Lucky Number Slevin" (13 mins.) is a rote behind-the-scenes featurette rendered palatable by B-roll of Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman breaking each other's balls. ("You were good in Seven," Willis tells the screen legend. "Crabby, but good.") Lucky Number Slevin's trailer plus startup trailers for Killshot, The Protector, Pulse, Clerks II, Scary Movie IV, and "ESPN"'s DVD line round out the platter. Optional subtitles append everything but the commentary tracks.
110 minutes; R; 2.40:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1; English SDH, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Weinstein/Genius
