Pulp Suspects: The Usual Fiction

Rating: Null/10 (28 March 2012)

Paul McGuigan directs "Lucky Number Slevin", a film which plays like "Yojimbo" making love to Guy Ritchie while "Usual Suspects" and "Pulp Fiction" force feed each other LSD bananas. The film's a good decade out of date, emulating the many "hip", "cool", "irreverent" crime and con thrillers of the late late 1990s, all of which tried desperately to parrot Tarantino. See Mamet for this stuff done better.
Our star is Josh Hartnett, a noir loser who's pushed through a postmodern amusement park. Usually with these films you'd have the hero, the "wrong guy", buffeted by a ridiculously convoluted noir plot. But here things are even more meta, climaxing with a revelation in which our hero "may or may not" be the wrong guy and "may or may not" be the one actually pulling the strings.
These days, casting Ben Kingsley in a film guarantees an absolutely ridiculous, absurdly "ethnic", racially dubious performance. The guy's jumped from Indian to Jew to Iranian to Arab to Cockney to Asian to puppet, but now he's a Yarmulke wearing Rabbi gangster. I'm waiting for the black-face Kingsley. Then I can complete my "Kingsley's Racist Caricature" collection and sell it on ebay. For free.
The film's best moments are a couple of simple, sexually charged conversations between Hartnett and actress Lucy Liu.
6/10 – Worth one viewing.