The highly stylized, wannabe-Tarantino thriller “Lucky Number Slevin” from director Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park) starts as an entertaining case of mistaken identities, but as the plot twists unravel, so does the film.

With a few seemingly random acts of violence and a wheelchair-bound Bruce Willis, “Slevin” begins with a tale that alerts the audience nothing in this movie is what it seems.

The main character is Slevin (Josh Hartnett), a young man down on his luck and staying at his friend Nick’s apartment.

Mistaken for Nick by two henchmen, Slevin is taken to see The Boss (Morgan Freeman), where he’s informed that he must kill the son of a rival mobster, The Rabbi (Ben Kingsley), in order to pay off a debt.

Hartnett is comfortable in the role of charming smartass (not to mention the towel he wears for the film’s first half hour), but when the movie transitions from light to serious, Hartnett remains in the earlier half of the film and is unable to provide any real menace.

Along for the ride is Nick’s neighbor Lindsey (Lucy Liu), who is quickly enamored of Slevin and offers to play detective and discover the mystery behind Nick’s disappearance.

Liu’s sweetly naA_ve performance is the movie’s best, and her character manages to be the only likable one in the film.

Like the Tarantino films it attempts to emulate, “Slevin” is unabashedly self-aware and more than once compares itself to other movies. In a discussion of Bond villains, Slevin explains that the most effective villains are those the audience can’t see (hint, hint).

And this is the film’s ultimate downfall: “Slevin” thinks it’s a lot more clever than it actually is.

While the movie’s beginning purposefully seeks to deceive and confuse its audience, its ending grossly underestimates its intelligence with a 10-minute explanation of every minute plot detail.

This spoon-feeding is not only unnecessary, it’s also insulting. Moreover, it takes the film from light-hearted crime-caper to tragic revenge-drama.

Although “Slevin” holds itself to be in the company of “North by Northwest” and “Pulp Fiction,” it ultimately is brought down by its own hubris.