The Usual Suspects minus balls, plus Guy Ritchie, equals...

Rating: 6/10 (29 May 2010)

Well, it equals a bit of a letdown. I like The Usual Suspects. It had style, it didn't hold back, and I didn't see the ending coming. By the end of this movie, the majority of the plot twist has been telegraphed halfway through, and what remains is a husk of The Usual Suspects. Its main flaw is that it breaks the old storytelling rule about showing rather than telling.
Not only that, it tries to do too many things. It has a love story. It has self-consciously clever dialogue. It throws in Guy Ritchie-style cinematography, which works, and some random Guy Ritchie over-the-topness, which doesn't. This all has the effect of neutering the movie and forcing it to pull its punches, because it can't do all of these things and still be a powerful mind-twister.
Lucky Number Slevin is not horrible, though. Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, and Ben Kingsley do good work with their odd characters. Lucy Liu unfortunately has a lot of that clever dialogue, but her character is nearly surreal enough to be interesting. Josh Hartnett alternates between convincingly natural and unpolished fake. The soundtrack by J Ralph improves the feel of the whole thing, and the visual style fits with the flow.
I'd recommend that if you watch this, you use your favorite method of turning your brain off, or at least down a bit, beforehand. Then it has a fighting chance to blow you away like it wants to.