Slick and enjoyable, but a little too clever for its own good

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2007)

This very slick, fast-moving crime thriller from Paul McGuigan actually has a very simple revenge story at its core, but writer Jason Smilovic seems to have worked hard at making it as convoluted as possible. Like a pair of seasoned hustlers, though, McGuigan distracts us with flashy visuals a la Guy Ritchie while Smilovic keeps us wrong-footed with his dense, fast-talking dialogue that appears to owe more than a little to Tarantino at times.
Josh Hartnett is engaging enough as Slevin, an amiable young man who finds himself mistaken by a couple of gangsters (Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley, both good) for his friend Nick Fisher, who just happens to be into Freeman for $96,000. Freeman is willing to settle the debt, however, if Fisher/Slevin is willing to bump off Kingsley. From this simple strand things take off in increasingly convoluted circles as Slevin finds unexpected  and incredibly fortunate, when you think about it  assistance from police coroner Lucy Liu who lives in the flat opposite Fisher. And while all this is going on a melancholic Bruce Willis lurks in the background in one of his sillier wigs.
This is one of those roller-coaster rides that barely slows long enough for you to draw breath, so determined is it to keep you guessing throughout its running time. For the most part, it's good  if over-derivative  fun, as long as you don't take it too seriously. But by its last reel it was straining to maintain its credibility as it pulled off its umpteenth twist. In fact, this is one of those films that's so deliberately convoluted that you can't prevent yourself from picking over it afterwards to find out where the inevitable plot holes are. And there are so many of these twists to be straightened out that it takes Smilovic a good fifteen minutes to unravel them all and that has got to be too long because, for my money, the truly clever films are those that, while they may be as convoluted as this, can be explained with a single devastating revelation.