Getting Away with Murder
'Lucky Number Slevin' skates, but 'Basic Instinct 2' should fry
By Andy Klein
Lucky Number Slevin opens with the very unlucky MGM logo, whatever that may really mean at this point, since, well, Mistah MGM, he dead, and the film is actually rolling out via the Weinstein Company. Within moments of that logo, we get a couple of mob hits that will make you jump out of your seat, and images of bloodied ledgers.
The first thing we hear after the credits is the immediately recognizable voice of Bruce Willis, saying "It all starts with a horse." Willis is playing a character the film sometimes refers to as Mr. Smith, though no one on screen or in the audience takes that seriously. Smith, sitting in a wheelchair in an airport lounge, proceeds to tell a long tale to an initially inattentive twentysomething, about a horse, a fixed race, an imprudent bet, and the bloody consequences that follow. The story is supposed to be an illustration of a type of con called the Kansas City Shuffle, but it really isn't ... until it is.
Nonetheless, it behooves the viewer to pay close attention, because director Paul McGuigan (Gangster No.1) and screenwriter Jason Smilovic are giving us fair warning that we're about to experience the Kansas City Shuffle firsthand.
Because of this elaborate intro, it's more than 15 minutes before we meet our titular hero, Slevin Kalebra (Josh Hartnett, also star of McGuigan's Wicker Park), who has just arrived at the New York apartment of his old pal Nick Fisher. Nick isn't there, so, when a couple of thugs show up to "escort" him to their gangland boss (Morgan Freeman) - named, simply enough, The Boss - they take Slevin instead, assuming that his denials are bullshit.
In no time, Slevin finds himself coerced into paying off Nick's gambling debts to The Boss by agreeing to kill the son of The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley), The Boss's former partner and longtime archenemy. ("Why is he called The Rabbi?" Slevin asks. "Because he's a rabbi," The Boss responds.) It's not long before Slevin is braced by another set of thugs - orthodox thugs, no less - and offered a similar sort of ultimatum by The Rabbi.
Things get more complicated ... way more complicated.
Lucky Number Slevin is, for better or worse, a state-of-the-art turn-of-the-millennium thriller. That is, it attempts to combine the visual pyrotechnics of David Fincher's Se7en, the sleight-of-hand narrative tricks of Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, and the snappy comic dialogue of Quentin Tarantino's everything. (If the influence weren't obvious enough, the cast includes three Tarantino veterans - Willis, Lucy Liu, and, in a cameo late in the film, Robert Forster.)
As is so often the case, the dialogue doesn't rise to Tarantino's level: Some of it's clever, but much has the forced, arch feel of (to use the most egregious example) Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. At one point, when Slevin is trying to convince his captors that he's not Nick Fisher, they say, "Tell it to the one-legged man" - to which he (speaking for the entire audience) responds, "What's that supposed to mean?"
This artificiality informs the performances as well: Few actors can be as intensely unreal as Kingsley (which is one reason he's so great doing Pinter), and at first I thought he was doing a parody here of Brando's Don Corleone. But, in fact, he goes beyond that, echoing Nehemiah Persoff's hilarious Little Napoleon in Some Like It Hot.
As in Usual Suspects, there are moments during which you'll think "Wait a minute: the way so-and-so is acting makes no sense!" But they fall into place when the story's layers of deception are peeled back near the end. This raises the question as to whether the film "cheats." It would take a second viewing to be sure, but, for all its trickiness, I think it plays by the rules. Indeed, the things that at first make no sense are all oblique hints to what's really going on.
Perhaps a better question is whether slamming together all the flash of Fincher, Tarantino, and Singer is simply too much. For some viewers, Lucky Number Slevin may prove, not merely too clever by half, but also too "stylish" by three-quarters.
No one will have that complaint about the predictably pointless Basic Instinct 2. One could almost have hope during the deliriously overheated opening sequence, in which Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is driving her expensive sports car around London at 110 mph at night, while exchanging hand jobs with a coked-up footballer. Eventually the car careens off course and into the Thames, where both it and the footballer sink like a -. Hmmm. Can't really use that cliché since Stone is the only one who doesn't sink, bobbing up on the surface and into the British system of justice.
In pretty short order, however, the entire film goes off course and sinks, as well, taking its lead actress with it. There really was no need for a sequel to the 1992 Paul Verhoeven/Joe Eszterhas original - which was itself a pretty dubious piece of work - beyond the need of a pickmeup for Sharon Stone's career. If people line up to see it, it will be less because they are wondering whatever became of the sexy, murderous Tramell than they want to see how Stone, in her late 40s, looks in the sack.
For the record, Tramell is investigated for possible murder, since the footballer may have been dead before the car went into the drink. Scotland Yard detective Roy Washburn (David Thewlis) is eager to nail her - possibly in both senses of the word - but the court demands a psychiatric examination. The moment Tramell lays eyes on the shrink in question, Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), she sees a challenging new victim.
And so it goes, with Tramell doing her best to secrete pheromones all on and about the good doctor, while he does his best to remain professional. Glass's closest colleague (Charlotte Rampling) tries to warn him off, but we all know that trim will trump ethics. After he finally goes to her place and does the deed, he appears to find the evidence that will convict her ... proving once again that people who live in Stone's houses shouldn't blow Glass. (Honestly, give me another month, and I'll do that better.)
From day one, there wasn't the slightest chance that Basic Instinct 2 could actually be good; the best one could hope for was that it would be bad enough to be inadvertent fun, in the manner of the subsequent Verhoeven/Eszterhas collaboration, Showgirls. And it comes close ... but not quite. Stone isn't so much playing a character here as a huge walking vagina with teeth; she wears a constant smirk, even in the throes of passion.
She isn't helped by the casting of Morrissey, who has roughly the romantic charisma and screen presence of one those interchangeable Number Twos on The Prisoner. Looking a bit like early Bryan Ferry, Dr. Glass is a bland piece of boiled meat, hardly a fit challenge for Tramell's sharpened nether incisors.
Published: 04/06/2006
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