Lucky Number Slevin is a veritable melting pot of film styles, buzz-inducing high concepts and A-list actors. Unfortunately, director Paul McGuigan's artistic hand tired mid-stir, allowing his film's gumbo-worthy dynamic potential to congeal into a mess of reheated Campbell's pottage. A neo-noir aestheticized crime film, Slevin depicts its title character's plight of mistaken identity, which pits him between two dueling city crime chiefs: The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) and The Boss (Morgan Freeman).
The film parades itself as a neo-noir -- originally a post-war genre that allowed audiences to grapple with complex themes of social alienation and changing gender roles. Despite Slevin's frequent references to noir stylistic tropes -- its chiaroscuro low-key lighting to create a shadowy aesthetic, its location in a city and Lucy Liu as the femme fatale -- Slevin's narrative manages to say very little. As Anthony Lane describes the film's generic development, Slevin is "Noir with the lights turned on."
In this film, a man named Slevin's spatial relocation -- he moves into someone else's apartment -- motivates his experience of mistaken identity and, thus, jeopardizes his life. A gun-toting Rabbi and trigger-happy Boss, despite their years of crime-related experience, determine identity solely by the location of one's apartment: how ironic. In their eyes, Slevin literally becomes someone he is not, which allows him to harness the inner Slevin who he himself never imagined he could be. In effect, Slevin takes it upon himself to outsmart the city's two fiercest crime ringleaders and their army of detectives and assassins -- most notably Brikowski (Stanley Tucci) and Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis).
Once upon in a time in America, soldiers returned from war, they displaced women from their factory jobs and everyone wrestled with their ensuing experiences of social estrangement by wandering through the nuanced diegeses of Fritz Lang's and Otto Preminger's rainy and back-lit Los Angeles. Although Slevin waxes nostalgic for this politically-embedded genre, it falls short itself of having a point. Sometimes lucky numbers aren't all that meaningful.
