10 Genius Movie Moments When Unreliable Narrators Changed EVERYTHING
9. Slevin's True Identity - Lucky Number Slevin
The Kansas City Shuffle, as Bruce Willis' Mr. Goodkat explained in Lucky Number Slevin, is when everybody looks right, and you go left. It's misdirection that was performed so perfectly by Slevin (Josh Hartnett), not only to the marks of his revenge scheme in the movie, but also to the audience.
From the start, Slevin is portrayed as an innocent guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, who gets caught up in a brutal and bloody war between The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley), thanks to the debts owed them by his friend.
It's what Lyndsay (Lucy Liu) believes, it's what the two warring gangsters believe, and it's what the audience is led to believe. That, and that he is being pursued by the self-proclaimed world-class assassin, Mr. Goodkat. His job, as given to him by The Boss by way of paying for Nick's debt, is to murder the son of The Rabbi, at which point Goodkat would murder Slevin.
However, when Goodkat shows up, he simply hands Slevin the keys to a car outside, in order to bring in the body of Nick, to make it look like Slevin died. This is when the illusion shatters, before the man who took the name Slevin explains he was orphaned by The Boss and The Rabbi, right before killing them in the same way they killed his father.