Two bookies are dead before the title card. A young man in a bus terminal listens to a stranger named Goodkat tell him about a fixed horse race, a dead family, and something called the Kansas City Shuffle. Then Goodkat kills him and puts the body in a truck.
That is how Lucky Number Slevin opens, and it is the right way to open a movie that spends the rest of its runtime lying to you on purpose. Paul McGuigan directed it. Jason Smilovic wrote it. It runs 110 minutes. It came out in the United States on February 24, 2006, through MGM Distribution Co., and in the United Kingdom on April 7, 2006, through Entertainment Film Distributors. That was 20 years ago. In Australia it was called The Wrong Man.
It is a black comedy neo-noir crime thriller, and it is a good one, though not a great one. The tagline is “Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong number.” The tagline is also the plot.
Trailer, via Vertigo Releasing.
Josh Hartnett and the Apartment That Wasn’t Locked
Josh Hartnett plays Slevin Kelevra, who is staying in his friend Nick Fisher’s apartment in New York City. Nick is missing. The door was unlocked. Lindsey, the neighbor, played by Lucy Liu, comes by and asks about it. She suggests Nick might be missing. Slevin does not have much time to think about it, because two henchmen grab him and take him to The Boss, played by Morgan Freeman, who mistakes him for Nick.
The Boss wants his gambling debt repaid, or he wants Slevin to kill the son of his rival, The Rabbi, played by Ben Kingsley. The Boss believes The Rabbi is responsible for assassinating his son, and he wants Yitzchok, called “The Fairy,” dead in return.
Slevin goes back to the apartment. The Rabbi’s men grab him too. The Rabbi also thinks he is Nick. The Rabbi also wants money. Slevin tells The Boss he will kill Yitzchok.
Meanwhile, Goodkat, played by Bruce Willis, is working both sides. He called in Nick’s debts. He plans to kill Slevin after Yitzchok dies and make it look like a double suicide.
Stanley Tucci plays Detective Brikowski, who is investigating both bosses and has been told something about Goodkat. Mykelti Williamson plays Sloe. Peter Outerbridge plays Dumbrowski. Michael Rubenfeld plays Yitzchok. Kevin Chamberlin plays Marty. Dorian Missick plays Elvis. Scott Gibson plays Max.
A Cast That Knows Exactly What Movie It Is In
The pleasure of Lucky Number Slevin is watching six actors who could phone this in decide not to. Freeman and Kingsley are playing two mob bosses who have been at war so long neither remembers why. Freeman is calm and almost bored. Kingsley is louder, funnier, and having a better time.
Willis is the best of them. Mr. Goodkat is a killer who narrates his own work like a man reading a bedtime story, and Willis plays him flat, which is the correct choice. Hartnett has the hardest job, because Slevin has to be a victim, a smartass, and something else underneath, and the movie needs all three to land. He mostly lands them.
Liu gets less to do than the poster suggests, but Lindsey is not decoration. She is the one person in the film who asks the obvious question, which is why the film keeps her around.
The Kansas City Shuffle, Explained
Goodkat explains the Kansas City Shuffle in the bus terminal at the start: it is a misleading double bluff. The mark looks right while you go left. The whole film is built on that idea.
That is not a spoiler. It is the instruction manual. Lucky Number Slevin tells you in its first ten minutes that it is going to trick you, then tricks you anyway. The structure is a set of nested cons: The Boss cons The Rabbi, Goodkat cons both of them, and Slevin, who looks like a man in the wrong place at the wrong time, is doing something else entirely.
The title is a joke about the number seven, and the film’s release was its own kind of slow reveal. Here is how it rolled out:
| Date | Territory | Distributor |
|---|---|---|
| February 24, 2006 | United States | MGM Distribution Co. |
| April 7, 2006 | United Kingdom | Entertainment Film Distributors |
That is a strange rollout for a movie with this cast. The UK got it six weeks after the US, and Australia got a different title entirely. The Wrong Man is a worse name, but it is an honest one.
Where the Movie Slips
The problems are real. The film runs 110 minutes and it feels longer in the middle, when Slevin is being dragged between two crime bosses and the movie mistakes repetition for tension. Slevin is kidnapped twice, once by each side, and the second grab does not add much the first did not already cover.
The violence is stylized to the point of weightlessness. Two bookies die in the opening, a young man dies in a bus terminal, and the film treats all of it as a punchline. That is a choice, and it is a coherent one for a black comedy, but it means nothing in Lucky Number Slevin lands with any weight. It is a puzzle box, not a tragedy, even though the backstory about Max and the fixed race is genuinely ugly.
The plot also cheats the way con movies always cheat. My read is that once you know the twist, some earlier scenes stop holding up, because they were staged for an audience that did not yet know what it was watching. Lucky Number Slevin is not as clean as it thinks it is.
What Actually Works
Here is what the film gets right, and it is more than the twist.
- The opening. Goodkat’s bus terminal monologue sets the rules, the tone, and the threat in one scene.
- The Kansas City Shuffle. A con movie lives or dies on whether its central trick is worth the wait. This one is.
- Bruce Willis. He is the engine. Every time he is on screen, the film tightens.
- The Freeman-Kingsley scenes. Two old professionals enjoying themselves is not a small thing.
- The title. Lucky Number Slevin is a dumb pun and it is the right dumb pun.
The order matters here. The twist is fourth on that list, not first. A movie built entirely on a reveal has nothing left after the reveal, and Lucky Number Slevin survives its own ending because the performances and the opening are doing work the twist cannot.
The Score
Lucky Number Slevin sits at 7.5/10 on TMDB, across 4,617 votes. That number is close to right, and it is close for the right reasons.
This is a film with a great first act, a good cast, a clever structure, and a sag in the middle that no amount of Freeman charm fixes. It is not The Usual Suspects, and it is not trying to be. It is a well-made genre exercise with one very good idea, executed well enough that you forgive the parts where it repeats itself.
The thing worth noticing is that the movie tells you its own trick in the first scene and still works. That is harder than it looks. Most con movies hide the shuffle. Lucky Number Slevin shows you the hands and dares you to keep watching.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
