Movies: Of Banter and Bullets

Slevin (Josh Hartnett) arrives in New York City with a broken nose and no wallet and unable to find the friend in whose apartment he's staying. On the upside, there's food in the cupboard and a funny, flirtatious woman (Lucy Liu) across the hall. On the downside, he gets abducted, in a towel and slippers, by a pair of thugs, and we begin to wonder just how ironic the title Lucky Number Slevin is going to be.

The answer is, very. The business of the film is to explain why this amiable hunk is being circled by spooky Mr. Goodkat (a tight-lipped Bruce Willis), a wise-guy cop (Stanley Tucci) and two crime lords (Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman). To call the film's plot labyrinthine is to understate the case. To say it works out with complete plausibility is to overstate it. Still, the story never runs completely off the rails and is, in any event, just a pretext for a lot of very sharp badinage by Jason Smilovic--a screenwriter who would have been at home writing for Cary Grant--for yards of terrific movie acting and for some well-timed direction by Paul McGuigan, who sometimes sidles toward pretension but never succumbs to it.

This is the fourth movie in the past month that is set in New York City and involves some sort of criminal activity, and all are smart and entertaining: 16 Blocks, also starring Willis, as an alcoholic cop trying to get a witness to safety; Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty, in which Vin Diesel's mobster acts as his own defense lawyer; and Spike Lee's skillfully orchestrated story of a bank heist, Inside Man. None of them require the audience to embrace heavy-duty fantasy or comic-romantic fatuity. They have grit, wit and style, plus a semblance of reality--things popular American movies regularly used to have. Is this a trend? One might hope.