It all started with a "Sure Shot" at the racetrack

Rating: 7/10 (14 April 2006)

(There are Spoilers) Clever elaborate but a bit complicated crime drama/thriller that covers a span of over two decades which is the time it took for everyone involved in a bloody massacre after a fixed race, at the Aqueduct Race Track in Queens NY, to come full circle. Back in the fall of 1979 Max a degenerate gambler desperate for money gets the word from a race-track tipster and close friend of his Uncle Sol,a big-time New York horse player that the number seven horse in the tenth race at Aqueduct that afternoon has been fixed, or secretly drugged, to win the race. Max then goes to his local bookie, Roth, to bet $20,000.00 on #7 on the nose. Leading all trough the stretch the number seven horse suddenly collapses and dies just before he hit's the finish line! With Max now broke and Roth in hot water with the mob for taking his bet both their lives on the line if they doesn't pay up.
This is a story that a Mr. Goodkat tells a total stranger at the almost deserted airport lounge before he, in what looks like to make a point, murders him. This sets up a chain of events that has the murdered mans, a petty gambler named Fisher, friend Slevin come to visit him after he's been forced out of his place by the city marshal. Slevin is mistaken for Fisher when he goes to his apartment and is roughed up by two hoods sent there by The Boss to pick up a $96,000.00 gambling debt that the deceased Fisher owes him.
Slevin not being able to convince The Boss that he isn't Fisher and at the same time not having the money to pay the head gangster back is forced to make a deal with him. Slevin agrees to knock off the gay son, Yitzchok, of The Boss' chief rival for control of the crime syndicate in the city The Rabbi. Slevin is later apprehended by two of The Rabbi's hoods and brought to his mid-town Manhattan penthouse. there he's told that not only is he in debt to The Boss for $96,000.00 but also to him for another $33,000.00! This has the unlucky Selvin now stuck between a rock and a hard place with his life not being worth a plug nickel!
We keep seeing Goodkat, who turns out to be a top-notch hit-man for hire, pop up all throughout the movie not really knowing just what his connection is with The Boss and The Rabbi as well as the confused and bewildered Slevin. Everyone involved in this strange arraignment have one thing in common that in the end ties all the looses ends in the movie together; the what's now mythical fixed tenth race at Aqueduct some twenty five years ago!
A lot like "The Usual Suspects" the movie "Lucky Number Slevin" has a storyline that has a number of different characters from the police mobsters bookies and local horse players woven into it that takes a while to unravel itself. Slevin at first comes across as an innocent and unlucky dupe, and victim of circumstances, who's caught up with things that he has no control off. But as the movie reveals more and more of it's secrets you somehow begin to realize that he's not the person that you at first thought that he was.
The connection between Slevin and the two hoodlums, The Boss & The Rabbi, is also not as accidental as it seems. You start to notice that he's setting up the two for something but why and for what? Slevin also has a connection with the mysterious hit-man Goodkat who's beginning to look more like the one that's possibly behind this entire grand and murderous plan.
The film stretches the creditability of it's story a lot by everything going off almost without a hitch with the exception of Slevin's live-in girlfriend Lindsey which in the end turned out to be very lucky for her. Unlike in the 1995 block-buster and highly popular "The Usual Subjects" the surprise ending, that took over 15 minutes, didn't leave it's audience up in the air thinking that they were watching and listening to a sloppy and made story, by the person telling it, just in order to be shocked or confused by it. The surprise ending in "Lucky Number Slevin" was a lot more believable and and at the same time shocking then you would have expected it to be and has you going back to see the movie again to spot all the missed clues that you at first overlooked.