C+

Who doesn’t like a nice, twisty gangster mystery with turns calibrated to keep you off guard and an ending calculated to astonish you with its brazenness, especially one crammed with tasty dialogue? They used to come fast and furious in the forties during the heyday of film noir, courtesy of the much-maligned studio system, and one was reminded of how much fun they were by a successful modernization like Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects” (1995). That’s the exalted company to which “Lucky Number Slevin” aspires. Unfortunately, though it has many virtues, it doesn’t quite make the cut.

The convoluted script by Jason Smilovic opens with what’s effectively a flashback, in which a callow young father tries to make a killing at as racetrack by betting the farm (and then some) on a horse he’s learned is rigged to win. Things don’t turn out as planned, of course, and his inability to pay back the money he’s borrowed leads to a series of deaths, including–it seems– his own, his wife’s and his young son’s. Cut to the present, where an unidentified young man is approached in a blindingly bright but deserted airport terminal by a wheelchair-bound chatterbox named Smith (Bruce Willis), who explains the meaning of the phrase “Kansas City Shuffle”–a locution indicating a clever means of directing somebody’s attention away from what’s really going on.

That becomes the motif of the larger plot that follows, a Hitchcockian “Wrong Man” scenario which begins as another young man named Slevin (Josh Harnett) arrives in New York City to crash in the apartment of his pal Nick, who’s unaccountably left the place vacant. Slevin quickly makes the acquaintance of Lindsey (Lucy Liu), a coroner’s aide who lives across the hall, but before anything can happen between them, two blundering thugs show up, mistake Slevin for Nick, and drag him off for a meeting with a crime lord called The Boss (Morgan Freeman), who threatens him with a dire fate if he doesn’t repay his huge gambling debt. But The Boss offers an alternative: he’ll forget the money if Slevin will kill his arch-rival The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley), who lives across the way in a twin tower, as isolated and well-defended as the Boss is himself. But as it turns out, Slevin is apparently but a cog in a larger, more ambiguous game, when Smith, now perfectly ambulatory, turns up as a high-priced hit-man who’s in the employ of both bigwigs. Also on hand is Stanley Tucci as a brash cop who’s certain Slevin’s up to no good.

It wouldn’t be fair to reveal the further contortions of the plot, but while you wish the turns would take your breath away (the way those in “Suspects” did), they really don’t, though not for lack of trying. Without revealing the details, it must also be said that things wrap up with a sequence that’s overlong and demeaning to some of the cast, and a sentimental twist that just doesn’t feel right after all the smarty-pants business that’s preceded.

But there’s fun to be had along the way. The picture looks great–production designer Francois Sequin and art directors Pierre Perrault and Colombe Raby have fashioned an elegantly colorful array of sets, which cinematographer Peter Sova uses with verve and dexterity under Paul McGuigan’s vigorous direction (even though their best efforts can’t make Montreal a fully persuasive stand-in for the Big Apple). McGuigan also gets solid work from his cast. Harnett, looking remarkably buff and clearly savoring the whiplash dialogue Smilovic has provided him with, is far more jovial and confident than he’s seemed in the past, and the chirpily pessimistic Liu makes a fine partner for him. As for Freeman, Kingsley, Willis and Tucci, they’re not asked to go much beyond their basic ranges, but they’re here for their presence, and it pays off.

“Lucky Number Slevin” is a tidy movie–the script’s honest, tying up all the narrative threads neatly in the end. And a good deal of the writing is slick and funny; you can understand why the actors were drawn to it. In the end, though, it winds up as little more than a clever puzzle. Though the pieces ultimately fit together, when fully revealed the picture proves less than meets the eye.

C+

James Mangold’s biopic of singer Johnny Cash has been called this year’s “Ray,” and that turns out to be a pretty fair description of it–or at least of what it tries to be. If you wanted to be flip about it, you might say that while “Ray” was a film about a music icon who was black, “Walk the Line” is one about the icon called the man in black. But to speak more seriously, the basic similarity is that they’re both very conventional Hollywood musical biographies, structured pretty much the same way similar movies would have been back in 1945 or 1959 and presented without a great deal of imagination or any special insight. Both are also notable for the uncannily accurate performances in the lead roles–by Jamie Foxx in “Ray,” of course, and here by both Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter (though in neither case would they have been the first names you’d have thought of for those parts). And they’re also likely to be remembered at Oscar time, at least in terms of nominations if not for the statuettes themselves, as Foxx was.

But “Walk the Line” doesn’t match “Ray,” not because it’s any less a slickly professional job but because Cash’s story just isn’t as compelling as Ray Charles’s. With the latter you had not only the man’s emergence from impoverished beginnings but his overcoming blindness, too; and in addition to his inveterate womanizing, his heavy drug usage and his dealings with record companies, there was the racial issue that put the singer-pianist in the context of the most significant element of social change occurring in the country. Cash had troubles in his life, too, but it would be absurd to say that they were in any way the equal of those Charles faced. As depicted here, in a script by Mangold and Gill Dennis based on Cash’s own autobiographical books (which may be the fundamental problem), he must deal with childhood trauma resulting from the death of his beloved older brother (Lucas Till) and the stern, unloving attitude of his alcoholic father (Robert Patrick). And his singing career will not only take a toll on his marriage to his early sweetheart Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) but introduce him to the woman who was his true soul-mate and became his real love–singer Carter (Witherspoon), who resisted his advances for years but finally became his second wife. (In fact, the movie seems to be essentially a two-hour difficult courtship.) Cash also had a serious drug problem that threatened his professional and personal well-being. But if you stack up Cash’s troubles against Charles’s, they come off seeming pretty minor. It may even be a shock to learn that despite his famous song from the perspective of a prisoner, Cash never served hard time; he did give a famous concert for the Folsom inmates, but that’s hardly the same thing.

That doesn’t mean that “Walk the Line” isn’t enjoyable, in a modest way. It includes a lot of Cash’s and Carter’s music, which is all to the good, and certainly Phoenix and Witherspoon prove engaging, even remarkable performers, going well beyond mere impersonation. But despite their excellence, the film never goes terribly deep beneath the surface of things; perhaps because it’s based on the singer’s own memoirs, it seems curiously superficial in its depiction of his dreams as well as his troubles. Of course, perhaps what we see here is pretty much all there was. But if so, the Johnny Cash so many people idolize and revere would appear to be more a triumph of showmanship than of reality. Nor is Carter explained any better. She’s resolutely chipper in spite of the fact that she has marital problems; in fact, her biggest crisis seems to arise when the conservative fans of her family puritanically sneer at her for insulting the sanctity of marriage by getting divorced (the movie is especially ham-fisted on this score). Somehow Phoenix and Witherspoon go beyond the blandness of the screenplay to suggest deeper currents in Cash and Carter, but they can’t do it alone.

The supporting cast strikes no particular sparks. Patrick is grim and sour-faced as Cash’s father and Goodwin no better than adequate as the luckless Vivian, while the parade of youngsters who have cameos as other rockers of the era–Tyler Hilton as Elvis Presley, Waylon Malloy Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis, Jonathan Rice as Ray Orbison–seem just like the impersonators they are. Technically the movie is fine, with glossily luxuriant cinematography by Phedon Papamichael and good period production design by David J. Bomba.

But though you’ll probably leave the theatre swinging to the music, this highly conventional movie really doesn’t do its subject justice: it’s a “Ring of Fire” that burns at distressingly low dramatic voltage.