For a while there, Lucky Number Slevin looked doomed. The bravura discomfiture of its prologue trips on an eventual binge of quirk-for-quirk’s-sake, star Josh Hartnett smirks through nearly the entire first act wearing nothing but a towel, and even Ben Kingsley suffers the indignity of a vaguely Brooklyn Hebrew accent more clumsily calibrated than an old Corvair. Before the slow, successive unfolding of the twists that redeem it, Slevin‘s hybrid of noir, screwball comedy and gangster picture comes within minutes of choking to death on its own smugness.

At least they tried: Liu and Hartnett bring the sensitivity in Lucky Number Slevin (Photos: The Weinstein Company)
That said, Slevin‘s redemption is rich, rewarding viewers with gambits tidy enough to recall the rush of films like The Third Man and The Usual Suspects. Both represent direct, powerful influences for writer Jason Smilovic and director Paul McGuigan, who team up here for the story of Slevin (Hartnett), a young man snagged in a case of mistaken identity that indentures him to warring crime lords The Rabbi (Kingsley) and The Boss (Morgan Freeman). Elsewhere in the mix, the assassin Goodkat (Bruce Willis) slips through the shadows in a mysterious, stoic quest for revenge, and Lucy Liu appears as the girl next door (literally) whose involvement with Slevin plants her in harm’s way.
The conventions surprise nobody: The gangsters yield all the conspicuously wise, hard-boiled observations their authority implies; Liu’s vulnerability feeds her lilting cynicism; a police detective (Stanley Tucci) bristles at Slevin’s ostensibly unwitting interference with his investigation; and Willis’s wraith-like hit man springs up everywhere without warning or announcement, never more effectively than in an opening sequence where he establishes the film’s backstory for a stranger at an airport. Of course, no one is just a “stranger” in noir, and the violence that follows–too tortuous and ultimately too climactic to detail here–bleeds into Slevin‘s flawed but inspired threads of love, death and revenge.
By the same token, like its contemporary Brick, Slevin is noir once- or perhaps even twice-removed from its deepest genre roots. Liu jumped to Smilovic and McGuigan’s defense when we recently spoke about the story’s eagerness to experiment with tradition. “To be honest with you, I think that both guys are very original and unique people,” Liu said. “And just like most of the artists I know, I don’t think anyone tries to come in and reinvent anything. They just come in with their vision and their thoughts and they do what they want with it. You know what I mean? I don’t think anyone thinks, ‘This persons’s trying to reinvent himself in this particular thing.’ It’s just another facet of who they are.”
And hooray for facets–when they are smooth. Liu herself is especially underserved in the filmmakers’ schema, with her and Hartnett’s interminable meet-cute interlude collapsing under what feels like hours’ worth of exposition. The way McGuigan tells it, a script as complex as Smilovic’s required him to find the scene’s spontaneity in Liu’s physicality. “When I saw (Liu) in rehearsals doing what she was doing,” McGuigan told The Reeler, “I was like, ‘We’ve got to capture this–we’ve got to capture this incredible spirit this girl has.’ We had to redesign sets and relight everything so she could go wherever she liked and just let her go free. That is when you do your job well: when you can see that and you observe it and you go, ‘OK, I’ve got to capture this,’ rather than saying, ‘Oh, can you be really funny again? Can you be bubbly again?’ I mean, that would be the worst direction you could ever give. So we just let them go. And then Josh, therefore, will react to her rather than react to me.”
Hartnett really does neither, however, until the end of the film. His death-defying resolve resonates in ways that his earlier, smart-ass posturing cannot, and he looks painfully out of place in his towel and slippers during his lengthy introduction to Liu. The overheated irony of Hasidic Jewish thugs and stoogy black enforcers somehow neutralizes Hartnett even more. Not until Smilovic and McGuigan show Slevin‘s cards is he so much as two-dimensional, and only in the film’s final 15 minutes does Hartnett brandish chops that come close to standing up to talents like Kingsley, Freeman and the particularly fine, brooding Willis.
It remains to be seen if Hartnett will earn his leading-man cred, but at least he says the right things. “As I’ve gotten older,” he told me, “I’ve started to see the value of complex and really well-written, fully-developed characters, and working with great directors who will help you kind of get through that. And working with great actors, obviously, if you can get there–if you can find those people. Now I choose a little bit more carefully. I’ve got a couple of movies I’ve done in the last couple of years that just have better characters. And when you find better characters, you do better work.”

Ben Kingsley, Slevin‘s source of seething rage and lousy accents
In theory, anyhow–at least it worked for Kingsley and Freeman, who share one remarkable scene as titanic archnemeses at the end of their respective roads. Kingsley recalled to journalists at the film’s New York premiere how nobly he and his colleague regarded each other, and how the set adopted a reverential hush as they prepared to shoot. McGuigan acknowledged the scene’s challenge, confessing a somewhat reactive change to the aproach he had taken on the rest of the film.
“Usually when you’re directing you’re trying to go about a scene, and the first few takes may not be what you’re looking for,” he said. “That’s when you really DO direct, whereas this one, straight off the bat, these guys were raising your game up so high that you actually have to start directing them in a more positive way, if that makes any sense. ‘Yeah, that was great, but … ‘ The positive nature of it. But the worst thing you could ever do to actors like those guys–or any actor–is to say, ‘Yeah, that was really great, but can you do it again?’ Because that’s not directing. That’s just hoping the shit will stick if you throw enough of it. That’s not directing to me. You have to keep correcting yourself and thinking, this is really good, but how do I make it better? How do I make it the scene I want to make it? And these guys look at you like they want you to do your job. They’re there for you, you know?”
Without them, Lucky Number Slevin may have sunk, and judging from his conceptions of the film’s best and worst scenes, McGuigan obviously did the best he could with what he had. For all of its angular complexity, Slevin is about frailty; as their criminal swagger melts into an acute sense of panic and even mourning, Kingsley and Freeman emphasize that quality more powerfully than the romance and revenge subplots combined. That they saw and fulfilled the film’s promise goes a long way toward validating it; that McGuigan manages an emotional payday despite its convolution makes it an appreciably intriguing find.

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