Review

Review Date: 9-April-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Just OK

Lucky Number Slevin (2006)

One of these days (if his career holds out), Josh Hartnett is going to complete the transformation from male starlet to adult, and in "Lucky Number Slevin" he almost does so before our eyes. Playing a seemingly innocent fellow with the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Hartnett starts out nubile and slaphappy and ends up considerably rougher around the edges. He puts on a pretty good show (both pre- and post-transformation, both in and out of a towel), which elevates the movie to a passable matinee. Without him, it might have remained what it essentially is: a vanity piece for filmmakers oversaturated with cinematic cool.

Saying that Hartnett makes the picture is quite a compliment when you consider who else director Paul McGuigan has to work with. Bruce Willis kicks things off as a slicker-than-Brylcreem assassin with that aura of winking detachment that's so utterly and profitably his own. Then Hartnett, as the young and unoffending Slevin, arrives in New York and is immediately picked up by warring crime lords who think he owes them money: The Boss, played by Morgan Freeman, and The Rabbi, played by Sir Ben Kingsley. These two old pros (I refer to both the actors and their characters) are of course intense as hell and built for drama of Shakespearean proportions. Ensconced in fabulous penthouses guarded like Fort Dix, they look like titans with the weight to mark "Lucky Number Slevin" as the real deal, i.e., a canny tale of corruption and retribution fostered by one generation and witnessed by the next.

But it's not, really. As the hero is ordered to snuff somebody or be snuffed in his stead, Jason Smilovic's screenplay becomes more overwrought with juvenile notions of family, necessity, and justice, and McGuigan bogs it down with a slavish devotion to hipster style. The violence is fairly well done and some of Slevin's smart-ass lines are worth a chuckle, but the garish art direction and predictable plot twists appear awfully eager for attention. On the whole, the movie smacks of fan boys, albeit fan boys of classic gangster flicks as well as more recent Tarantino rip-offs. Lucy Liu seems particularly old-fashioned as the flighty girl-next-door who gives poor Slevin a hand and her heart. She stays sweet as he grows tougher, a callow smart-aleck who taps a hidden lode of urbane machismo. I'm sure this is a projection of the writer and director's self-fantasies, and they're just lucky that Hartnett embodies it with ease.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.