Quirky, dark, urban hip, uncanny and nice gangsters... Wait, "nice gangesters"?
　　
　　Yes, Sir Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman as mob bosses - Who would've thunk?
　　
　　Gangsters are supposed to be merciless, smart and violent - not the fatherly figure Mr. X-Men or the straight-faced US army general. Put the slick-tongued Mr. Slevin in front of Tony Soprano or Don Corleone, he wouldn't have survived for more than 5 minutes. Or maybe gangsters are nice guys who loves to talk a lot and let people carry big guns into their offices, who knows.
　　
　　But don't get me wrong, I LOVE this movie even though the gangsters are little bit too nice: acting is first rated - Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Josh Hartnett and even Lucy, everybody delivered tour de force performance. (Bruce Willis? Don't go there... :-) Josh and Lucy had great chemistry hitting off the scene when they first met in the apartment, and Lucy's monologue rocks! "You mean this isn't the first time a crime lord has asked you to kill the gay son of a rival gangster to pay off a debt that belongs to a friend whose place you're staying in as a result of losing your job, your apartment and finding your girlfriend in bed with another guy." - you just gotta love those good screenwrites.
　　
　　OK, so you want to talk about Bruce Willis? My favorite scene of him in the whole god damn movie is when he said this at the end: "I am a world-class assassin, fuckhead." Now that sums up Bruce's entire career - man in trench coat, both hands straight with big guns and an intense look on the face, frozen forever, appropriate in every action movie he's done. In the bonus material he asked Morgan Freeman: "Career advice, do you think I chose the right career?" Freeman laughed, didn't say a thing.

If you're not a South junkie you may not enjoy this movie at all - it was all about the South, the music, the story, the weird yet profound deep south of the Americana. We travel with Jim White, a folk singer, to various small town USA and visited barber shops, fast food joints, trailer parks and... you get it, churches, everywhere we go, we see and hear things so ordinary yet so iconic, mesmerizing and poignant.
　　
　　"I love the small town. It's not even a half-mile across the whole town. Very small. This way over here we have the church. Over here we have a truck stop. Over here we have the juke joint. Back behind me we have the prison. It's your typical Southern town. Some people go to church. Some don't. It's just one of those small towns." — The Mayor, Ferriday, Louisiana
　　
　　Some complain this movie is stereotyped since all it portrays was how poor and strange the South is - get over it, if it's part of the South then why not show it? I am sure there're movies depicting filthy rich white Southerners (maybe a redneck too, like the chimpanzee who's ruling the US of A) that make people think the South is all rosy and elegant and gone-with-the-windish, then so be it. You see only what you choose to see.
　　
　　Love the music and the cinematography in this flick. Heck, you can't get a bad picture of the South.