It may seem unlikely that Lucky Number Slevin and The Benchwarmers have entirely different filmmaking philosophies; they’re both, after all, failed comedies. The distinction lies between the extremities of their attitudes. One is deathly in love with itself. The other just doesn’t give a fuck. Slevin displays one of the worst influences of Tarantino- inspired crime movies. It wants to be adorable.
The opening minutes have some of the anxious comic momentum that Richard Shepard pulled off well in The Matador. But director Paul McGuigan is not really interested in thematic integrity. Plot complications become an end in themselves.
Josh Hartnett leads a major cast of Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Lucy Liu, Stanley Tucci and Bruce Willis. He’s the title character Slevin, for whom everything is going wrong. Things get worse when he stays at his friend Nick’s apartment and is mistaken for Nick by rival gang lords, who proceed to demand money from him and punch him in the nose a lot. At least Lucy Liu lives across the hall. It’s no use investing in any of these people; they’re probably not who you think. They’re basically interchangeable anyway. Like the films of Kevin Smith, and occasionally those of Richard Linklater, every character’s dialogue is written in the same voice.
Despite its transparency, there’s an energy that keeps the movie watchable. McGuigan even finds a unique way of photographing Liu. Usually made to look imposing in vixen roles, her tomgirl Lindsey gets a different approach. It’s too bad it’s about the only tonal variation that McGuigan brings. He directs Liu and Hartnett to have not a second of dead air between their lines, keeping things extra bouncy. The duo also exchange an unlikely amount of Bond trivia, sounding like they’ve been temporarily possessed by a 007-obsessed screenwriter.
Slevin’s quirkiness is as self-conscious and forced as the mannered artiness of Cache. Forget about good movies that wind up being cool. Lucky Number Slevin wants to be cool at the expense of everything.
The Benchwarmers
Rob Schneider is the best aspect of The Benchwarmers. That should be all that needs to be said, but The Benchwarmers must be discussed. It goes like this: Rob Schneider plays a somewhat cool former nerd, David Spade plays a still total nerd and Napoleon Dynamite plays himself. They decide to challenge a Little League team of bullies to a game in order to make up for the torment they received from bullies as children. It’s probably preferable to them returning to the junior high school where they were once tormented and getting revenge by beating up students currently enrolled there, but it makes about as much sense.
Dennis Dugan recreates the disaster of his Problem Child (1990) with a thoroughly classless kid comedy. While its division between jocks and nerds is predictably unsophisticated, Dugan aims low, not even bothering to make his outcast characters believably human so the comedy is unidentifiable. At one point Napoleon Dynamite breathes in a kid’s fart and exclaims, “Yum, I love beef stew!” Throw in some groin shots, a cameo by Kit from Knight Rider and a robot butler sidekick and you’ve got a movie. There’s an intended message of empowerment here, which may have meant something if The Benchwarmers didn’t consider gays and midgets the pinnacle of hilarity.
What is the pinnacle? write: palermo@thecoast.ca
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2006.