Screenwriter: Jason Smilovic
You know that unfortunate feeling you get when you’re watching a movie but you’re painfully aware that you’re watching a movie? And then you distract yourself further by trying to figure out why you don’t feel fully engaged, involved, committed. In the corporate world, this phenomenon is known as a “disconnect.” In the movie world, I call it “jumping the track.” The film doesn’t qualify as a full-blown train wreck; it just lost its footing a little. So to speak.
And that, I’m sorry to say, is what happened with Lucky Number Slevin. A bump here, a jolt there and off it went, heading west when it should’ve kept going north. With a talented cast like Morgan Freeman, Sir Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis, Stanley Tucci, Josh Hartnett and Lucy Liu, this film’s derailment really surprised me.
So what caused LNS’s wheels to fall off? As with other typical gangster flicks, LNS featured rival gangs, lots of guns, pints of spilled blood, and the brutal treatment of victims of circumstance. Unlike its brethren, a mistaken-identity device served as the catalyst for the intricate storyline. But in the end, this film had a few more brains than brawn.
Interwoven throughout the clever, sometimes philosophical script, were themes like revenge, patience and discipline. One could sense the essence of a Chinese fable (real or imagined) about two adversarial emperors who are so afraid of each other that neither one has stepped foot outside his brick fortress for over twenty years. Maybe LNS tried too hard while answering the “ancient” question: How do you get to two men that can’t be gotten to?
Maybe the script’s who’s-on-first, answer-a-question-with-a-question, everyone’s-a-smartass style of dialogue was a little too clever, and was spoken too quickly at times. I found myself perplexed during certain scenes.
Maybe the filmmakers stretched their Kansas City Shuffle theme too thin. It’s a clever con to be sure. But relying on flashbacks at the end of the film to reveal how some earlier scenes really played out, well, that’s just cheating, boys. "Slight of hand" film magic is tough to pull off. Only a perfect execution earns the coveted audience reaction, “Wow! I never saw that coming! What a great ending!” (Good examples of this: The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense.)
Then, when you think the credits are about to roll, the writer and/or director seem to say, “Silly audience, you can’t turn us off yet. We also threw in a twist…We placed the clues right before your very eyes…. Remember? Here, and here, and here…. Oh, look, here comes the twist…” [that some of you may have figured out half way through the film]… “Wait for it…wait for it…There it is!” So now you think, “Okay, the real end. You got me. Time to watch ‘The Daily Show.’ Well, not quite. They still had one more trick up their sleeves.
What I liked: Good energy from, and on-screen chemistry between, Hartnett and Liu, although she mumbled or rushed through half of her lines.
What I didn’t: I'm the first one to complain about bad/inane/cliche writing. However, this script was probably too clever for its own good. LNS's complicated dialogue probably would’ve been better appreciated if this story had been written as a novel instead of a screenplay. And the distracting wallpaper designs used on every set made me cross-eyed.
Madeleine says: I hate to say it, but I’d recommend using a rental coupon for this one.
What do you say?
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