Intended as a fancy roller—coaster; Willis in a honorific role

Rating: 3/10 (22 May 2009)

I do not know if it will be of much use to point that Slevin is a new try on the character patented successively by Hammett in writing and by Kurosawa and Leone on footage—the mysterious stranger who . Some scenes in SLEVIN are amusing—the lustful Asian babe is nice—but the movie is generally unexciting and uninteresting. Except from some funny notes, SLEVIN is uninspired and slummy. Who cares about the Rabbi and his queer son and Freeman's regularly dignified diction? The Willis extravaganza named SLEVIN is a fancy thriller with some high class cast, trying also to look classy and witty and cultured—they even quote Hitchcock. Willis has a supporting part; the plot involves two mobsters fighting each other. The movie has many things that are nice; or, better—quite a few things that are nice. It only lacks the essential. It constitutes moderately amusing fluff, intrinsically shallow extravaganza, with not much to offer, it lacks the essential fanciness and witty merriment and exciting pace of such tales, it does not seem fast—paced, as it should, but hurried—as it should not; Willis is not required much.
And what SLEVIN seems to strive to imitate is rather the new OCEAN'S ELEVEN, except that it does not achieve at all that level of merriment. The boy who plays the titular character is indeed very good—looking, and an execrable actor.
Somewhere the characters quote a Hitchcock thriller; then they talk a little about Mrs. Saint. For me, she's a more interesting topic than SLEVIN.
I agree that Eve Marie Saint was hot; more than 13 yrs. ago I have found out that in the Actors Studio epoch Eve Marie and Lee were the true feminine stars, the most impressive upcoming actresses.