Lucky Number Slevin (2006)

Lucky Number Slevin arrives from 2006, a year when a crime picture could still assemble Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis, and Stanley Tucci in one room and ask them to do nothing but menace and quip. Paul McGuigan directs Jason Smilovic's script with the confidence of a man who has watched Pulp Fiction many times and intends to let us know it. The plot is a Kansas City Shuffle, a double bluff wrapped in a horse-racing debt, and it unfolds with the grim satisfaction of a puzzle assembled by someone who has misplaced a few pieces on purpose. It is competent. It is also entirely content to be a genre exercise.

The film's cultural furniture belongs to its era and travels no further. Its crime bosses and detectives happen to be played by a notably mixed group of actors, though the screenplay never asks us to think about that fact even once. The Rabbi's son, Yitzchok, is gay, and the movie announces this by having everyone call him The Fairy, a pejorative deployed with the subtlety of a brick, before he is dispatched to move the plot along. Lucy Liu's Lindsey is a coroner with a sharp tongue and a camera, useful for roughly twenty minutes before she is shot to protect a secret and later resurrected by a man's affection. She is a device with good posture.

Beyond that, the film has nothing to say and no interest in saying it. There is no economic critique beneath the gangsters, no environmental conscience, no meditation on the body, no acknowledgment of neurodivergence, no revision of any history. It does not lecture. It simply wants to be clever, and it mostly is, in the way a magic trick is clever right up until we see the hand.