Slevin the Lucky Numbers is directed by Paul McQuegan and starring Josh Hartnett, Morgan Freeman, and Ben Kingsley, released in 2006.
In a sense, "Lucky Number Slevin" is very similar to the segment structure of Quentin's film, it has a documentary display of each specific content of the film, but at the beginning, it does not explain the causal logic between these segments, so the audience's acceptance of these segments is only a curious overall acceptance. With the full explanation of the different segments, suddenly, the relationship between the segments came to light, and suddenly, the barriers between these segments were broken, so that their strange and unrelated elements were communicated, and suddenly, there was an aura of "one son living, all living".
The film's segments are roughly divided into three parts.
One is that in the beginning, two people are killed in different places, and what they have in common is that they have a ledger. In this flashy introduction, the suspense of the audience is aroused: why did they die, and what did they die for?
The second is a man who calls himself Smith in the waiting room telling a strange man the story of a gambler. This clip, without the following text, is completely out of context from the entire film. The Smith man tells the story of a man named Max, who was in high debt because of a failed horse bet, and was killed by the casino's behind-the-scenes owner, two men, who killed the whole family separately. One killed him personally, one killed his wife, and the other aimed a gun at his son Henry. The camera's account of the final death is vague, such as the killing of the wife paragraph, only one person walks into the house with a spear in the lower body, kills his son Henry, there is only one analogy shot, and then a gunshot. How many years ago, the whole family extinction incident, what is the real ending, who is the murderer, the movie has not moved so far, and it will not be revealed until the third chapter reappears.
Third, the film begins a formal modern narrative.
The man suddenly appeared in a house. We don't know where he came from, we don't know his purpose, but we trust him, and that's the movie's hoax. It is always easy for us to believe the character who first appears in the movie, this is because according to the laws of viewing that we are exposed to, the first contact with the character, because of the preconceived impression, or because of the long time of acquaintance, will always let us dispel our guard against him, and it is easier to have a sense of trust in him, which is actually a sense of substitution Potential for the joining of the character.
A successful film is a deliberate misdirection of the audience. Then a woman named Lindsay came to the man's room. The appearance of this woman plays a role in lubricating the plot, so that the audience knows the origin of the man in front of him. The woman apparently knew Nick, the original owner of the house, and when she rushed in, she thought the strange man was Nick. During the conversation, the very Westernized woman, played by Liu Yuling, is named Lindsay, and the strange man begins to dictate his self-experience. He calls himself Sleven and recounts a series of unfair encounters that he has suffered today.
In his gushing narrative, there are corresponding pictures, but the color of these pictures is obviously not a normal color, this picture is just an unreal state of his narration. Women have always had an astonishing gift for discerning what men narrate, and Lindsay was quick to point out that the friezes he had encountered today were not three, but four, as he himself had said.
At first, Sleven's preconceptions as a victim have been fixed in the minds of the audience. The film cleverly uses the lengthy meeting process between Lindsay and Slevin, and their kind of funny and humorous dialogue, so that the audience downplays the doubts about the content of Slevin's narrative, that is, Hollywood movies pay attention to details and paragraphs, and do their best to show the vivid elements of the characters between paragraphs, so that these parts that can be seen by the audience seem to be real, so that the unreal parts of the film are effectively covered. Here, we can see that when Slevin sent Lindsay, he deliberately showed the front half of the body wrapped in a bath towel, so that Lindsay looked back and saw his little brother when he entered again, and these small details with ambiguous plots made the passages of the two people fluctuate. Liu Yuling, who is in a posture, also shows a woman's style and rough hair very Westernized.
Subsequently, Slevin was repeatedly abducted and taken to two characters named "The Boss" and "The Priest". These two times were forcibly kidnapped, with a comical correspondence principle, because the film tells us that his name is Slevin, but has always been regarded by both sides as Nick, and Nick owes a lot of money to the "boss" and "the priest" respectively.
The film thus reveals that the "boss" and the "priest" have always been secret opponents, wanting to kill each other. There is a scene earlier where the "boss's" son is killed by the killer, and the "boss" believes that the "priest" is responsible, so he hires Slevin and asks him to kill the "priest's" son to pay off the debt.
In both the "boss" and the "priest", Smith appeared. In "Boss", Smith plans to have Slevin kill the "priest's" son and then kill Sleven himself, creating the illusion that Slevin and the priest's son shoot each other. The whole movie is confusing at this point.
However, when Sleven comes to the hotel to kill the "priest's" son, he and Smith work together to deal with the "priest's" men, and the two are intimate, at this time, the mystery of the movie is about to be revealed.
Slevin and Smith visit the "Boss" and the "Priest" respectively. The following shot suddenly jumps to the point where the "boss" and "priest" are tied to a chair, and the mystery of the film is revealed, and the second story is also picked up here.
It turns out that Slevin is Henry, the son of Max in the second part, and he changed his name and surname to the name of the horse that his father lost his foot, in order to pay tribute to his father.
The owner behind the horse racing yard that killed his father was the "boss" and the "priest", the two men teamed up to kill Slevin's father, and let the killer Smith kill Henry, Smith found out of conscience, his men spared, took Henry, many years later, the grown henry in the name of Slevin, and Smith (real name nickname "Good Cat") launched a complex revenge plan.
The two men killed the "boss" and the "priest" accountant in charge of the accounts, respectively, which is the reason why the two people seen in the first part were killed. From the two men's ledgers, he then found the common debtor, Nick, the gambler who listened to Smith's story in the second part. After Smith knocks Nick unconscious, he lets Slevin stay at Nick's apartment, and then Smith meets with the "boss" and the "priest" separately, and lets Slevin participate in this complicated plan as Nick, and Slevin pays off the debt by killing.
After this mystery is revealed, of course, it gives people a surprising and enlightening feeling, but when you think about it carefully, it seems to be more or less like a move. The film racks its brains to come up with an unexpected story, but this murderous plan is self-inflicted. As it is stated earlier in the movie, Slevin can easily kill the son of the "boss", then he can also kill the "priest" and "boss" without effort, so why set up such a clever and dizzying case?
The film is obviously showing that it can easily lead the audience into the misunderstanding, and the innocent person who makes the audience believe is precisely the executor of the plan, which makes the audience open its mouth and shoot the case in surprise, but when the backstage story is explained, it feels that the logic is insufficient.
Therefore, Slevin used the method of his father's murder to kill the "boss" and "priest" respectively, and took revenge on Xue Hate.
In this process, Lindsay's role cannot be forgotten. The woman who performed the autopsy, perhaps because of her work, was also tainted with a little talent for detectives, tracked down Smith, found that Smith and Slevin had appeared in the "priest's" villa, and took a mobile phone photo of Smith, so Smith shot and killed her, but the film subverted this scene in the end, so the film played the audience again, telling the audience that it was Sleven who told her to put on body armor after learning of Smith's plan to kill her. Through the memory lens, the film makes up for the parts that were not explained in detail when the same plot was explained earlier, in fact, the film is a bit clumsy in supplementing these contents. Because when Slevin gets rid of the "boss" and "the priest" earlier, back at the hotel, the film deliberately makes a disconnected performance, in which the footage of walking in the strange corridor and the scene of Lindsay in bed, the film is extremely unsmooth, obviously making a hint of ulterior motives. These all make up for those plot disconnects through the film's supplementary narrative.
The bald sheriff in the film is also killed by Slevin in the car, and the film's supplementary shot tells us that he was the killer who pointed a gun at Slevin's mother.
The unexpected ending of the film is a return to the past, when Smith and young Henry drive into the distance, and the film time and space return to the past.
The story background of the whole movie is actually not worth scrutinizing, because the more elaborate the plan, the more flawed it is. It focuses on the theory of cinema, the "Kansas trick" that Smith calls it, that is, when everyone is staring to the right, you go from the left. In fact, the fundamental purpose of this kind of trick is to surprise people, "what is seen is not what really happens." The film shows this theory very mysteriously, which makes people stunned, there is no room for aftertaste, but this is enough, the audience feels very happy to be deceived once, satisfied to come out of the cinema, feel that their ignorance and the complexity of the world, and suddenly feel that it is more appropriate to be in a calm state around them. The deceptive function of the film is vividly reflected here.