Written by: Susan Granger
http://www.susangranger.com

The success of "The Sting," then "The Usual Suspects" and "Pulp Fiction" opened up a genre of convoluted crime plots, a fractured concept that's stretched to pretentious extreme with "Lucky Number Slevin."

After a blood-splattered beginning involving a rigged horserace at Aqueduct, three murders and a hapless guy who loses $22,000 to a bookie back in 1979, the story jumps ahead to the present in New York City, where a case of mistaken identity catapults unassuming, easy-going Slevin (Josh Hartnett) into the middle of a personal vendetta between two underworld kingpins: The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley). With a fast-talking, flirtatious neighbor (Lucy Liu) as his only ally, Slevin is under constant surveillance by a shadowy professional assassin, known as Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis), and relentless detective Brikowski (Stanley Tucci) who suspects something is going down in his precinct but has no clue what that is.

Writer Jason Smilovic, who favors old-movie allusions, including Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" and Sean Connery's James Bond, director Paul McGuigan ("Wicker Park") and overworked editor Andrew Hulme have concocted an ironic, confusing thriller that eventually becomes somewhat less cloudy - via the device of a clarifying phone call - but is never quite resolved, like the Kansas City Shuffle. 

Clad only in a lavender towel during much of the set-up, hunky Josh Hartnett is convincing, if lacking in depth, while steely Bruce Willis is devious and enigmatic. In contrast, Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley would actually chew the scenery if they weren't bound to chairs during their climactic confrontation.

On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Lucky Number Slevin" is a slick, stylized 6. It's not as clever as it thinks it is and, somehow, the high-stakes never pay off.