Four people get killed by the time the opening credits have rolled for Lucky Number Slevin, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then it was my second movie of the day, and the first had been the god-awful sludge of You, Me and Dupree — if only, in that movie, Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson had got shot in the first few minutes, it would have been a much better movie. I’m not sure what it would have contained, but it would certainly have been improved.
I’m not really sure what Lucky Number Slevin contains, either: it’s a genre movie, a plot-heavy shoot-’em-up with noir overtones, and we’ve seen such things so many times that it feels like it doesn’t contain anything except echoes. It may, indeed, be entirely empty of content — unless you count its style as content, and of that it has plenty.
Well, one should regard the style as content, because such movies are new twists on old movies, and here it’s the style that counts. Most movies are recycled, restyled versions of predigested and regurgitated matter, but sometimes that’s a virtue: it’s a way of being a film buff while wallowing in trash. Movies like Lucky Number Slevin, hyperconscious of their own generic/genetic inheritance, depend for their impact on the fresh spin put on old plot points, characters and stereotypes.
So one can point out, in the style of The Player, that Lucky Number Slevin is Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels meets Kiss Kiss Bang Bang meets Miller’s Crossing meets North by Northwest. Actually, no, that won’t quite do it, but never mind. What’s important is that it’s amoral fun — a guy’s movie, certainly, but fun.
Josh Hartnett plays the titular Slevin, who turns up at a friend’s apartment, intending to stay over for a bit. Almost before he can get out of the shower and dry himself off, let alone get dressed, he’s been kidnapped and whisked off to a stately crime lord’s loft apartment. There, mistaken identity or no, he is inveigled into a tit-for-tat war of assassination that pits black gangs against Jewish gangs. Yes, Jewish. He has also been accosted, within minutes, by his friend’s neighbour, played with skittish charm by Lucy Liu.
With Morgan Freeman as the black crime lord and Ben Kingsley (sorry, Sir Ben Kingsley) as the Jewish one, we have some richly humorous characterisation going on. Bruce Willis plays an assassin and doesn’t even try to keep up with the characterological heavyweights; he’s a blank, an enigma, and that works too. We all know how these high-powered assassins work — they are staple characters that function like unchanging archetypes. It’s a mistake to try to make them real people, as Pierce Brosnan so disastrously essayed in The Matador. At any rate, Willis played the same role in The Jackal, only there he was trying to be serious.
Amid all this, Hartnett holds his own with an appealing charm and savoir-faire. His dark-eyebrowed face is good at doing quizzical, which is much required here as Slevin gets dragged ever further into a series of nefarious plots. Cute Hartnett is a self-conscious actor, possibly because he is so cute, but here his self-consciousness works as irony. This is needed in a film of so much contrivance.
At any rate, it’s all very entertaining. What matters in Lucky Number Slevin is that it do this manic generic recombination with style, which it certainly accomplishes. The various kinds of wallpaper on view are in themselves a wonder — Pedro Almodóvar must be green with envy. If you lose track of the plot, just watch the wallpaper.