Smell the Movies
Smell the TV
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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| Year: | 2006 |
| Country of origin: | Germany / USA |
| Director: | Paul McGuigan |
| Genre: | Twisty crime thiller |
| Starring: | Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley |
| Rating: | 4/5 |
| IMDB link: | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425210/ |
| Tagline: | Wrong Time. Wrong Place. Wrong Number. |
| Favourite line: | "Fuck you both." |
Slevin Kelevra is a man whom bad luck seems to follow.
He's just lost his job, just caught his girlfriend in the act sleeping with another fella and just been mugged upon arrival in New Yoyk. Then, to top it all, the friend he was supposed to be visiting has vanished and two of NYC's most lauded gangsters are after Slevin for money that the missing friend, Neil Fisher, actually owes in gambling debts in a case of mistaken identity.
Sheesh, can his life get any worse?
Hartnett plays Slevin with his usual roguish charm and Lucy Liu makes for a likeable enough foil to his misadventures.
But it's a schizophrenic beast.
The first half of the movie plays it for laughs, coming across as a lightweight, almost throwaway piece of frippery that almost had me switching it off.
I'm glad I stuck with it though because, as the minutes tick by, the intensity picks up and, by the end, this is damned tense stuff, dark and brutal, with more twists than Lombard Street.
Freeman and Kingsley make for excellent villains and, if it weren't for the annoyingly self-aware initial phase of the movie - you know what I mean: characters coming out with dialogue that no normal human being has ever uttered and only movie characters talk this way with the aid of a script-writer trying a little too hard to be clever - this would have got top marks.
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