Just your luck

Will you enjoy Lucky Number Slevin, Paul McGuigan’s twisty crime flick with comedic aspirations? Try a little test by reading the following bit of badinage.

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“They call him the Rabbi.”

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“Why?”

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“Because he’s a rabbi.”

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If you find that amusing, then you’re in luck. Lucky Number Slevin screenwriter Jason Smilovic’s sense of humor relies heavily on the kind understatement that punctures expectations for actual punch lines. Otherwise, he studs the dialogue with obsolete-sounding slang like “What’s the happenstance?”

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But if actual laughs are more important to you than just the facsimile of jokes, and if you like to be genuinely surprised by a movie’s attempt at head games, Lucky Number Slevin will strike you as an entirely synthetic experience. It wants to be like Pulp Fiction or The Usual Suspects in the worst way, but resembles a copy of a copy of a copy that no longer resembles the original.

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In the grim prologue, an enigmatic hit man called Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) regales a stranger with a generations-old tale about a fix at a horse race that went wrong, leading to the death of a hapless gambler’s family. Aftershocks of the massacre continue into present day, and we see a montage of tough guys dying amid hails of gunshots.

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Having splattered us with blood, Lucky Number Slevin shifts into whimsical mistaken-identity mode. Slevin (Josh Hartnett), a young out-of-towner, crashes at the New York apartment of his friend Nick. Slevin’s unlucky streak takes a turn for the worse when mob enforcers repeatedly mistake him for Nick and drag him across town — at one point while wearing only a towel — to meet two crime lords. Slevin discovers that Nick has staggering debts to both the Boss (Morgan Freeman) and the Rabbi (Ben Kingsley).

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The Boss leads an African-American gang, and the Rabbi heads up a Jewish one, complete with Hassidic thugs, and each occupies the top floors of skyscrapers on opposite sides of the same street, so Freeman and Kingsley can glower preposterously at each other from dozens of stories up. Does director Paul McGuigan intend their animosity to be a metaphor for the political rivalries of ethnic groups in big cities? Probably not, but it’s the closest thing Slevin comes to an original idea.

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Unable to convince either mobster he’s not Nick, Slevin must achieve impossible tasks — like murdering a heavily guarded stranger — to stay alive. Meanwhile, Mr. Goodkat appears to be working for both the Boss and the Rabbi, and he shows an enigmatic interest in Slevin. Freeman and Kingsley seem intent on enjoying their roles while wasting little effort on them. Kingsley sounds like Robert De Niro trying a Yiddish accent, while Freeman’s laid-back menace is getting hard to distinguish from his laid-back amiability.

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The film portrays Slevin as both a capable hero and innocent nebbish: Hartnett may have a sculpted physique, but he also sports a dorky, protruding cowlick. For the comic aspects to travel, the role needs either the rabbity nervousness of a Matthew Perry or unflappable deadpan like Bill Murray. Hartnett’s Slevin seems only remote, as if anesthetized from his predicament.

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Lucky Number Slevin’s flickers of life come from Nick’s across-the-hall neighbor, Lindsey (Lucy Liu), an amateur sleuth and incorrigible flirt. Liu can be icy to the point of immobility when cast as male fantasy heroine or villain, such as in Kill Bill or Charlie’s Angels. But here, as the only character who approximates a real person, she’s spunky and spontaneous. She even sounds credible during mannered, pop-conscious conversations, such as a discussion of which actor played the best Blofeld, James Bond’s nemesis in the 1960s.

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Watching Lucky Number Slevin, you imagine that the filmmakers have watched plenty of movies but absorbed only the superficial. McGuigan makes plenty of macho gestures, like his casual attitude toward gun violence and a willingness to offend (one character is called “the Fairy”). But the plot actually slows down, rather than speed up, as it approaches its predictable endgame, and nobody seems to invest any emotion in the characters. Audiences have seen so many clever thrillers in recent years that they should be able to spot a counterfeit a mile away.