Lucky Number Slevin: Critic Reviews

For all its game invention, is less Pulp Fiction than an Elmore Leonard knockoff crossed with Deathtrap: a thriller that holds less interest -- and less water -- the more it reveals about what's actually going on.

This star-studded jigsaw puzzle of revenge and mistaken identity thinks it's terribly smart, although it amounts to an empty, self-satisfied imitation of Pulp Fiction.

Why, oh why, should we give a stuff? I'm not sure.

This pop-culture-infused mistaken-identity thriller ultimately grabs hold and beguiles, though its convoluted plot takes a while to get going.

It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

If Lucky Number Slevin was as good as it is clever, we'd be talking four stars here.

A smug, derivative, but frequently witty crime cartoon.

Jason Smilovic's screenplay for Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number Slevin would be too clever for its own good if it weren't so ... darn clever.

Like the recent Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Slevin is a real-world crime tale with no grip on reality, just an obsession for gimmicky movie-brat fantasy. Believable, it's not.

Lucky Number Slevin is an odd but tasty duck.

With so many players in this shell game, a viewer could get paranoid. That's the idea.

It shrinks your perception of what movies can do.

I keep seeing films in which A-grade actors fill not just the top slots but some of the lesser roles, too, only to find themselves squashed by a script, or by a weight of contrivance, that would be lucky to bring home a C-plus.

It's the worst kind of con: It tells us it's a con, so we don't even have the consolation of being led down the garden path. The rug of reality is jerked out from under us in the opening scenes, and before long the floor is being dismantled.

The talk is witty, the twists are ingenious, the look and the mood are drop-dead.

With its diabolical ending, this is the movie equivalent of a crossword puzzle: fun, clever, and disposable.

Lucky Number Slevin is an ingenious maze that viewers will enjoy getting lost in. It's in the rare category of movies I immediately wanted to see again.

With its curlicue plot, consummate cast and crackerjack dialogue, Lucky Number Slevin is the sharpest bang-bang flick of the year so far.

It took me all of 10 minutes to decide I hated it.

Everything in it -- every confusion, every line of unspeakable dialogue, every red herring, every camera setup -- has been borrowed from some movie you've seen before.

It finally all makes sense after a fashion, and I think and hope that you will be entertained by all the narrative legerdemain.

This mistaken-identity thriller delights in narrative complication and Tarantino-esque self-awareness; it's when the labyrinthine plot starts to make sense, ironically, that the pervasive shallowness becomes a liability.

A smug, deliberately convoluted mix tape of Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Guy Ritchie and Hitchcock with (mostly) a cast to die for, Lucky Number Slevin is great fun for, say, 20 minutes.

It's self-consciously clever in a not-very-clever way, a puzzle only its creator finds puzzling. It's fun to listen to, not to follow or watch.

Lucky Number Slevin feels exhausted -- like a movie that somehow got lost in time and arrived six years too late.