Sans Quentin  Pulp friction: Josh Hartnett is locked and loaded
in Lucky Number Slevin.  You may not yet have lost your ardor
and respect for the pressure-point hammer blow Quentin Tarantino
executed on American movies, but it's difficult at this late
date not to view him as an imperative inoculation with
unfortunate side effects: gas, bloating, dizziness, delusions of
cleverness. Imitators flock when coolness seems an everyman's
right, and because QT's achievement is 75 percent chutzpah,
film-geek craziness and attitude (the kind that allows your
characters to ramble for many script pages about TV shows and
cereals), he made his mini-revolution look far too easy.  The
fad seemed to have peaked a few years back (somewhere between
1996's 2 Days in the Valley and 2000's Four Dogs Playing Poker),
but overwritten, slang-fueled screenplays still impress the
small-studio suits. And so we have Paul McGuigan's Lucky Number
Slevin, a smug, derivative, but frequently witty crime cartoon
set in a mythical New York City