An Engrossing Revenge Epic

Rating: 9/10 (29 January 2014)

Bruce Willis plays a world-class assassin with a soft spot in "Gangster No 1" helmer Paul McGuigan's "Lucky Number Slevin," and he wears a hairpiece, too! This complicated, flashback-riddled, surprise-laden, revenge thriller co-stars Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu, Robert Forster and Stanley Tucci. McGuigan and "My Own Worst Enemy" scenarist Jason Smilovic keep you guessing throughout their elaborately plotted film's 110 minutes. The humor as well as the quirky dialogue stand out. One gangster lectures our hero about horses: "My father used to say: 'The first time someone calls you a horse you punch him on the nose, the second time someone calls you a horse you call him a jerk but the third time someone calls you a horse, well then perhaps it's time to go shopping for a saddle." McGuigan stages everything with a fresh eye for detail. For example, consider the way that the baseball that strikes bookie Bennie Begin in the eye and kills him is handled. Sometimes, it is just the crazy wallpaper that McGuigan uses that catches your eye. Essentially, the filmmakers orchestrate the action around their own clever gambler's maneuver known as the Kansas City Shuffle. According to murderous hit-man Goodkat, "Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right and you go left." You can never take anything literally in "Lucky Number Slevin." The hero is not who he really appears to be, and we're the only ones that know it. Nevertheles, even we don't know everything, and McGuigan created considerable tension and suspense by withholding this information. In some ways, ""Lucky Number Slevin" is comparable to the "Usual Suspects." Like Tarantino, McGuigan enjoys making references to popular movies, and Hartnett and Lucy Liu converse about the James Bond characters. Later, one of the mobsters makes small talk with our hero and refers to Hitchcock's "North By Northwest." "Lucky Number Slevin" unfolds with an intriguing tragedy involving a racetrack wager on an ill-fated horse back in 1979. It seems the horse was shot up with drugs and was supposed to win a race but died instead before it reached the finish line. One young fellow's entire family pays for his egregious error, and they suffer death by shooting. The man who sought to exploit the secret of the drugged steed has to wait years before he is eliminated, too. Nick Fisher is sitting in a depot when he meets Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) sitting incongruously in a wheel chair. Later, we are introduced to the actual protagonist (Josh Hartnett), who finds himself in an interesting predicament in another man's apartment. Our hero spends the first half of the action on the wrong side of the eight-ball before he surprises us with his actual identity. Every character possesses something interesting about them. You'll meet a Hassidic Jewish gunsel who never says anything and it makes him singular. The ending appears to come out of left field. On the commentary track, McGuigan said that he likes to keep the audience confused. Josh Hartnett spends about a quarter of the film wearing nothing but a towel. Lucy Lui is cast as a sexy coroner.
Ostensibly, a young man's life (Josh Hartnett) is turned upside down after he loses his job, his apartment, and catches him girl cheating on him. This is a really amusing scene. His girlfriend is having sex with another guy. She is on her hands and knees and the guy is doing her doggie style when Hartnett walks in on them. Despite being caught in this humiliating position, she carries on a conversation with him. He cannot leave town so he visits a friend's apartment and encounters a pretty lady, Lindsay (Lucy Liu), who showed up looking for sugar. Eventually, because he inhabits the apartment of Nick Fisher, two rival gangsters make some outrageous demands on him. The Boss (Morgan Freeman) wants $96 thousand, while his competitor the Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) wants $33 thousand. These two men were once friends but now they are enemies. They live across from each other in Gotham high rises and can see what each other is doing when they stand at their windows. In a sense, this enmity resembles the competition between the opposing sides in the town of San Miquel in Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars." About a half hour before its finale, McGuigan's film begins to yield its secrets.
Enigmatic but exciting, "Lucky Number Slevin" will keep you involved from fade in to fade out with all its twists and turns. The violence earned "Lucky Number Slevin" an R-rating. For the record, Hartnett gets punched twice in the nose, and later Stanley Tucci wallops him in the stomach. Several characters die in a brutal manner. Indeed, the first character that we see is shown as he is about to enter his car. We are looking at the scene from inside the vehicle when we see the man approach his car and then the driver's door window shatters with blood and he smashes throughout it. The second man dies when a baseball is hurled at him. This occurs moments before the second man's bodyguards are injected with poison before they realize they have been stricken. Two criminals suffocate in a barbaric death with plastic bags over their heads that are taped snugly around their necks. For the record, McGuigan abhorred the title "Lucky Number Slevin" and said Kansas City Shuffle would have made a better title.