Excellent black crime caper with impressive all-star line up
The man obviously needs money. This is the only explanation for the sudden proliferation of his movies. Maybe he just has to pay too much child support for Ashton Kutcher, but for for some unusual reason, there are a number of recent excellent Bruce Willis movies out there I had never heard of and accidentally stumbled over on the movie channel of my satellite TV provider. The splendid 16 Blocks was one of them, but even more surprising was the 2006 Lucky Number Slevin (also known as The Wrong Man outside the U.S).
The first thing you notice about the movie is its cast: Ten years ago, this would have been a director's dream, as it wouldn't have got much bigger than this, with Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Danny Aiello, Lucy Liu, Stanley Tucci and the ever amazing Robert Forster. Directed by the rather unknown Paul McGuigan and written by the equally mysterious Jason Smilovic, this is a quirky thriller with many comic elements and a classic and surprising Sting / Sixth Sense twist at the end.
The plot is easily told: hapless charmer Slevin Kelevra is being mistaken for his best buddy Nick Fisher, who unfortunately owes the two competing crime syndicates a fair bit of money. Each of the two mobsters demand Slevin to work for them in return for their money, so he has to find a way to extricate himself from the situation. Helping him is the love interest, played by a hyperactive Lucy Liu.
The cinematography is excellent (the best girlfriend ever commented very favourably on the excellent art direction, which funnily enough is by a bunch of frenchmen), the actors look like they're having fun hamming it up, and the story is nice and cryptic, with twists and turns that kept me scratching my head.
Quintessence? 90 fun minutes with great actors, guns and mobsters.
What's not to like?
Sources:IMDB and my own patchy memory