Blood and jokes don't mix

Scottish director Paul McGuigan, who made this film in America with a luxury cast and a considerable amount of money, directed Gangster No 1 in the UK, a violent but impressive East End thriller.

Lucky Number Slevin is almost equally violent but has pretensions to be an ironic comedy. Clever and genre-bending as the film often is, the blood and the jokes mix uneasily.

The central character is Josh Hartnett's Slevin, a man with permanent bad luck. When his life inevitably goes wrong in LA, he moves to New York, but once there he finds himself a marked man. This is because two criminals who hate each other's guts mistake him for the gambler who owes them money.

One is The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley) and the other The Boss (Morgan Freeman). They have apparently killed each other's favoured sons and want someone to avenge them. Slevin will do fine, since he won't have to be paid. The fact that his debt will be forgiven is enough.

Complicating matters is Bruce Willis's professional hit man, trying to play one side against the other. There is also Lucy Liu as a mortuary pathologist who takes a fancy to Slevin and somehow seems implicated.

There's a lot of quality about the film, even if the whole doesn't equal the parts. McGuigan is clearly a smart film-maker and there's an equally smart film-noirish screenplay from Jason Smilovic, but it all seems a bit too clever by half and its comparatively slow pace makes its 110 minutes seem at least 10 minutes too long. A little less gore might have been a good thing, too.

Lucky Number Slevin
Cert: cert18