Review of Lucky Number Slevin (2006) by Markb. — 08 May 2006

Regardless of subject matter, style or quirky flourishes, the ONLY characteristic that should place a movie in the far-overused category of "Tarantinoesque" is that Quentin Tarantino himself wrote and directed it.

That didn't stop far too many hacks over the past 12 years from watching Pulp Fiction (some more than once) and chirping, "Hey, I can do this, too!" Even though such resultant efforts as Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead and The Last Days of Frankie the Fly should've consigned this genre to the same receptacle as the calypso movies of the late 1950s and the lambada movies of the early 1990s, Lucky Number Slevin proves that some dead things just won't stay buried.

In telling the story of a luckless kid who becomes entangled in a deadly underworld Hatfield-and-McCoy feud, writer Jason Smilovic and director Paul McGuigan throw in all the expected ingredients: a tricky, flashback-heavy structure, a cast of (mostly) criminals, some bursts of violence and gore that the filmmakers think are too offbeat to be offensive, dialogue that nobody speaks in real life unless they're trying too hard to imitate Tarantino characters, and frequent instances where two or more people pause to have a conversation about some thirty-year-old Top 40 hit or TV show or action movie (in Tarantino's films, these little digressions are often major highlights; in his imitations they just grind the action down to a complete halt).

In David Cronenberg's The Fly, scientist Seth Brundle teleported a steak only to find, when applying the taste test, that it wasn't a real steak, and therefore was inedible. Same here: Smilovic and McGuigan do everything that Tarantino does but are missing two essential ingredients: the heart and soul.

Go back to David Carradine's self-defining speech about Superman and Clark Kent in Kill Bill Volume 2, or Sam Jackson's surprisingly moving one near the end/beginning of Pulp Fiction about how hard he's trying to be the shepherd, and you'll see that QT has very few modern equals when it comes to revealing character through dialogue.

No such luck in Slevin: it's all surface and gimmicks, with obnoxiously baroque look-at-me set design that brought back childhood memories of my sister eating too many Pixy Stix and throwing them all up, a so-called "surprise ending" that I guessed almost from minute one (not that predictability is necessarily a fatal flaw, but having nothing else up your sleeve is), and a truly repugnant mingling of bloodshed and sentimentality.

Among the large cast, only Bruce Willis and Robert Forster bring something resembling originality or energy (perhaps because they've worked with Tarantino in the past and know the drill)...but this is the first time that the great Morgan Freeman has ever slummed, and as for Ben Kingsley as his rival, "The Rabbi", his accent brought none-too-welcome memories of Laurence Olivier's "I hef no son!" bit in Neil Diamond's version of The Jazz Singer.

(Is the reason he insisted on billing himself as "Sir Ben" here that, after doing this and the Uwe Boll vampire movie Bloodrayne in the same year, he felt the need to overcompensate?) And why does Josh Hartnett continue to get steady work, anyway? Inoffensive at best in ensemble movies like Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor and Sin City where the special effects and action sequences are the real stars, when he's given leads in things like 40 Days and 40 Nights or Hollywood Homicide or McGuigan's Wicker Park, Hartnett displays terminal blandness of a sort that hasn't been seen or heard onscreen since the last straight-to-video release starring "the two Coreys" hit the cutout bin.

In all fairness and with due respect, I DO have close friends who DID enjoy this movie (largely because they didn't guess the ending), so in the interest of equal time let me present the op-ed view: Lucky Number Slevin is every bit as clever, witty and well-conceived as its title.