FauxNixon

Lucky Number Slevin can be seen almost as an adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest from a more modern perspective with the clever, witty rapid speech of very early films.  The director Paul McGuigan seems to have made this adaptation work, and work very well at that.

The movie opens with Bruce Willis telling a story about a rigged horserace gone wrong and a family being killed for it to a random person at what seems to be an airport terminal.  He tells the story well and then the story moves on to the present.  Slevin Kelevra (Josh Hartnett) emerges from a shower in what is apparently his friend Nick’s apartment in a towel.  Lindsey (Lucy Liu) knocks and comes in and begins to ask to borrow a cup of sugar before she realizes Slevin is not Nick and asks him who he is.  They immediately have a great chemistry and Slevin tells her that once he arrived in New York, he was mugged by a mugger who apparently is responsible for his broken nose, missing wallet and identification, but not for his watch remaining.  She finds the story interesting, but has to run off to work.

Another knock brings in two black gangsters representing The Boss (Morgan Freeman), who want whoever is living at the address to accompany them to see The Boss immediately.  Slevin tries to explain he’s not Nick, but the two don’t care; they were told to retrieve the person at the address and Slevin seems to fit the bill.  Once they arrive, Hartnett, still in his towel, tries to tell The Boss that he isn’t Nick, but Freeman simply tells him that Nick owes him $96,000, but in exchange for killing his rival gangster The Rabbi’s (Ben Kingsley) son, in revenge for The Rabbi having killed the son of The Boss, the debt will be wiped clean.  Slevin is returned to his apartment.

Another knock brings two Jewish gangster representing The Rabbi and the same series of events seems to unfold, except that the debt is $33,000 and the target is The Boss.  Still in his towel, he is then returned to his apartment, where he is finally able to dress.  Lucy Liu arrives and the two begin to try to unravel what’s going on and in the process develop a romance.

The plot is much more complicated than that and has quite a few twists and revelations, but revealing those would ruin them for anyone who hasn’t yet seen the movie.  That said, the ensemble puts on a great show.  Bruce Willis, who plays a character called Mr. Goodkat, maintains a lot of his cliches, but is convincing and manages to pull off his own version of the fast-talking, quick-witted kind of speech employed.

Kingsley seems to have a strange accent.  I think he’s getting at a Hebrew accent to make his character seem a bit like an Israeli or something, but it doesn’t come off well, but it’s not very distracting and his acting is as good as ever, that aside.

Freeman, Lucy Liu, and Josh Hartnett each perform quite well and whenever they are talking to each other, even though there’s the feeling of a rehearsed set of rapidly repeated lines that’s intentional, they also seem to genuinely mesh in a way that the other characters do not.

While this movie is probably never going to develop the infamy of North by Northwest, it is a very effective and suspenseful thriller, with surprisingly plot twists, great acting, and clever writing.  It’s not Hitchcock, but it’s still great.