REVIEWED - LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN: TWO years after they worked together on Wicker Park, an insipid US remake that drained the life out of its French source material (L'appartement), Josh Hartnett and Paul McGuigan are reunited with more dismal results on Lucky Number Slevin

This convoluted would-be thriller opens on a violent, time-shifting sequence featuring an extended flashback to a racetrack scam in 1979 and its bloody consequences.

That complicated set-up is presumably intended to tantalise the viewer, but it only serves to confuse for a while, and to alert us that the movie's dialogue is self-conscious and pretentious.

A cue to its feeble wordplay comes early on, in an airport scene where a professional assassin implausibly named Mr Goodkat (a blank Bruce Willis) casually breaks a young man's neck and remarks, "Sorry about that, kid. Sometimes there's more to life than just living."

Hartnett plays the eponymous Slevin, a hapless character who loses his job and his girlfriend, turns up at the New York apartment of a friend and gets caught up in a laborious case of mistaken identity. The movie contrives to have Hartnett wearing only a towel for close on half an hour - even when gangsters take him across town to meet The Boss (Morgan Freeman), a criminal kingpin who lives in a high-security penthouse apartment that faces on to the den of his arch-rival, The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley, parading his knighthood in the credits).

The shadow of Quentin Tarantino hangs heavily over the screenplay by Jason Smilovic, who suffuses his tediously plotted scenario with arch popular culture references to, among others, James Bond, North By Northwest and Columbo. However, Smilovic demonstrates none of Tarantino's wit or invention as the body count escalates in this flashy film that's nowhere as clever as it thinks it is.