Wants to be a clever cool movie. Fine images, poor despicable story.

Rating: 4/10 (4 April 2014)

I was curious about this movie that went right below the radar and ends up with a big score on IMDb years after release. Usually when a movie nears 8.0 stars on IMDb you can expect a sure amount of quality. Now if quality is the good start it is not sufficient to make a good movie.
Lucky Number Slevin has many qualities: high production values that translate into fine photography and direction, with a great cast. The editing is precise and smooth to blend all this too. Now you start a production with a script and I very much doubt that the script for Lucky Number Slevin was ever that great. I have a name for that narrative category: Pretty Clever Whodunnit. It is a tired plot device to draw an apparently convoluted story where you only tell what it was all about at the very end.
I know that most people are suckers for this kind of a story, especially when it is very well packaged such as in this movie. Personally I find this to be more deceptive than really clever. I enjoyed Usual Suspects on first viewing but I cannot stand a second viewing. I enjoyed Sixth Sense too but I would never watch it again. Obviously not everybody is able to come close to Psycho in the sense that the point of the movie shouldn't be concentrated in a final bang.
Aside from that, Lucky Number Slevin has a tonal problem. It has a cartoonish approach to characters (especially with Morgan Freeman as The Boss and Ben Kingsley as The Rabbi) that is really at odds with the core story of a mistaken identity case that implies lots of - cold blood and gratuitous - murders. Does it aim to be a light realistic Tarantino endeavour or a dark thriller? It does not choose, it wants to be a funny and cool story where people happen to go murder somebody else just like that. And this puts the movie very low on my scale.