Smokin' Aces (2006) Reviews

• Up in Smoke

  DrPhilmreview2007-02-12

  Joe Carnahan is a decent director, but he's a terrible scriptwriter, as anyone watching ten minutes of "Smoking Aces" would quickly see for themselves. People were walking out of this film in little groups as the plot unfolded and the characters got more outrageous and unlikely. I almost walked out myself, but wanted to see the end of the train wreck. Jeremy Piven is terrible as a headlining Las Vegas magician (!) who agrees to testify against a top mob boss. So all types of hit men (and women) go to Lake Tahoe to smoke the drug addicted performer, hoping to collect the one million dollar bounty. The worst of these are the three loud Nazi skinhead hit men, who are just ridiculous. The only reason to see this movie is to watch Ben Affleck get smoked by the Aryan hit men. And then use his dead body as a puppet, leading to the best acting Affleck has done in years. This soooo makes me hope Tarentino's next film (coming out in April) is a return to form like "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservior Dogs" instead of a stupid, dumb violent action picture like this, which is clearly trying to be Tarantino-like, but fails miserably.

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• A shaggy dog story that goes enjoyably nowhere.

  slimjack2007-03-23

  There is a new genre infesting our nation's movie theaters. With apologies to Garrison Kellior, let's call it "guy noir". Films aimed directly at the young, hip male audience. Movies that are an unholy combination of old fashioned film noir and the modern action movie, as directed by the class clown. They offer fast paced entertainment, great character actors, twisty plot lines, explosions and more spent ordinance than used in a typical week in Baghdad. Even new genres breed clichés however and the original freshness heralded by Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is beginning to smell the slightest bit stale. This brings us to Smokin' Aces, a movie that isn't so smug as to be intolerable or so brilliant as to be ground breaking. Rather it is good, competent, workmanlike example of its genre, which is bad news for a movie that wants to be hip and edgy. Smokin' Aces has the requisite twisty plot. Actually it has at least nine plots, all twisty. In fact it has so many plots the movie dissolves into a series of incidences strung together by a smattering of narrative glue. Aces, a card magician and mob nabob, turns federal stoolie and a dying Godfather posts a high dollar contract on him. Naturally every photogenic hit-man with the weekend free descends upon Ace's casino penthouse to do the job and collect the dough. Smokin' Aces tries hard and includes everything needed to qualify as guy noir. It even tries to incorporate the "Tarantino Digression". That is, extended expository flashbacks incorporated for no good reason except that they are fun to watch. Smoking Aces can't quite pull these off as they require a defter touch than the movie is capable of. There aren't any real people in Smokin' Aces. All the characters are strictly stereotypes played for effect rather than reality. Jeremy Piven as Aces is the self loathing hop head, Alicia Keys and Georgia Sykes are the hot lesbian hit team, Ben Afleck is the hipster bounty hunter and so on. Everything you need to know about these guys you learn in the first split second they are on the screen. There is no star in Smokin' Aces. Afleck, the biggest name, has a relatively small part and is upstaged by his hat. You might remember Chris Pine, Kevin Durand and Maury Sterling as the Tremor brothers if only because they were the loudest, most violent bunch in a loud violent movie. The only actor who rises above caricature is Ray Liotta, who invests his FBI agent with quiet dignity and a touch of pathos and in doing so sticks out like a sore thumb. It takes a strange sort of movie for a review to criticize the one genuinely good performance in it but Liotta just doesn't fit. Smokin' Aces manages to hold its whirly gig self together for the most part. There are a few problems. It goes on too long after the climatic blood bath wrapping up plot threads you probably didn't notice amongst the explosions. There is a denouement where a hero, brought in from way out in left field, makes an existential choice that is not nearly as agonizing as the movie thinks it is because we have no emotional investment in the fellow making it. Though the final plot twist is prepared for and makes as much sense as anything else in the film, still it feels flat and unsatisfying. Think of Smokin' Aces as a shaggy dog story. It's long, involved and fun to listen to but ultimately goes nowhere.

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• Gore and Grins for the Guys

  lotekguy-12007-01-26

  Here's another addition to anyone's list of definitive "guy flicks". Compared to testosterone treats like Jason Statham's pair of Transporter stints, this one offers a more complicated plot, fewer explosions and chases, but more gruesome killings. Plus some fine touches of grim humor, and a dash of eye candy. It comes from the fertile, if demented, mind of Joe Carnahan, who struck first with the cheapie hit Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, before upgrading to studio-quality crime drama in Narc. Arguably, he's the US doppelganger for England's Guy Ritchie (Lox, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch - both also featuring Statham), since he's less arty and cinematically historical about showcasing mayhem than Quentin Tarantino. Jeremy Piven plays a Las Vegas lounge star and gangster wannabe, who first endears himself to the Mob, runs afoul of the local Capo, then offers his testimony to the FBI in exchange for protection and profit. When the Mafiosi put a $1M price-tag on his head, hordes of hit persons (solos and teams, male and female, foreign and domestic; the EEOC would be more than satisfied with this field's diversity), some hired, others freelance, converge on the casino penthouse in Lake Tahoe where their quarry is "hiding", while his agent (gifted, yet underemployed, Curtis Armstrong) negotiates terms with the Feds. The deep cast includes Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia, Jason Bateman, Alicia Keys, and plenty of other familiar faces. Carnahan careens among multiple arenas of plotting, with FBI briefings filling in the audience and their agents on some of the players they're about to face, building to the inevitable chaos of competing factions converging on Piven and his legion of bodyguards, in what promises to be a dazzling display of carnage and comedy. The reality comes pretty close, with a couple of cool surprises along the way. Unfortunately, Carnahan, like a certain US President who comes to mind, crafted his superb attack without a viable exit strategy. After the cosmic convergence, there's more exposition and anticlimactic wind-down than anyone needed, or the preceding frenzy deserved. Enjoy the movie, fellas. But for those who wait (or double-dip), expect the DVD's extras to include at least one alternate ending, and several bloody and/or sexy deleted scenes that were axed for optimal running time, rather than lack of titillation.

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• A movie you want to like... but just can NOT!

  ianridd22007-06-25

  This movie should get high marks for its style, but everything about its style that is likable, was ripped off from Guy Ritchie. The plot is sooo out there, that I can only imagine that the writer, director... producers and pretty much every studio exec was doing more blow than the characters in the film. I got the distinct feeling that the ending was done in re-shoots. There are only two main characters in the entire ending. And the ending is basically Andy Garcia reading you the reveal, as one gigantic paragraph. Something tells me this was not the original ending. At its best, the movie is a psychedelic, post-modernist romp through the crime genre. All the usual wash-outs and degenerates from the Mickey Spillane novels are here, but they have a 21st century spin to them. High high marks for Jason Bateman. His cameo appearance is almost worth the price of admission. The violent scenes are pretty much the best part of the film, and some of them are genuinely tense. But they are filled with glaring holes. Time and again, cops and security guards fail to follow basic precautions and wind up getting killed for it. Alicia Keys and Ryan Reynolds are miscast. Andy Garcia! Holy cow, what does he call that accent? Southern/Boston. Most of the pivotal events of the film are based around happenstance and freak luck. Without getting into the details, the ending is unbelievably hack and unimaginative. Put it this way, the emotional core of the story is based around a character that we never meet, except in flashbacks. And the inciting incident of the film (the hit being put on Israel) appears to have been a giant misunderstanding. (the guy said they wanted "Israel's heart". They construed that to mean they wanted him dead. But who put the million dollars in a swiss bank account and told every hit man in the Western Hemisphere that they could have it for killing him? Makes no sense) What a rip off!! High Points: 1) Jason Bateman (is AMAZING, in fact I swear that when he is slapping high-fives in the hotel room, Ben Affleck is struggling to keep a straight face.) 2) The Neo-Nazi characters (even though it felt as though they had been lifted from Big Lebowski and The Road Warrior). Their malevolence is so gleeful that it's contagious. 3) Jeremy Piven's coked-out, paranoid Israel. If there is a shred of human emotional core to this film, this is it. He nails the character, both megalomaniacal and insecure. As his situation becomes increasingly desperate, he sinks further and further into self-delusion. The camera trains on his eyes and Piven somehow builds a universe of frailty inside. It's wonderful. Low Points: 1) Andy Freakin' Garcia (yeesh!). Speaking of a universe of self-delusion. Watching an actor slip in and out of an accent is like listening to a guitarist play out-of-tune. But it is clear that Andy Garcia is utterly convinced of his own prowess. Sad. 2) Guy Ritchie rip-offs everywhere 3) Movie begins and ends with tons of back story given in paragraph form. Always a bad sign. 4) The sense of time is extremely distorted (I swear the skinheads were riding the elevator up to the penthouse for twenty minutes) 5) The cops and security guards in this movie are only one step above Keystone Cops. Bumbling idiots who fall for the flimsiest deceits. 6) There are at least five characters who take a ton of bullets, and somehow live through it. And when I say a ton of bullets, I'm talk ten to twenty at point blank range. One is difficult to believe, but it happens over and over again. 7) Everything about Alicia Keys' exit from the building is contrived and impossible to believe. 8) The writer and director seem to treat story like style and style like story. The story behind this movie is confusing at best and ridiculous and contrived at worst and serves only as a silly excuse to get Nazis and Lesbians and coke-heads and cross-dressers together for an orgy of violence and cool dialog.

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• Complex but enthralling multiple contract killer film...

  joebloggscity2007-01-14

  Smoking Aces is a film that tries hard, and in doing so is one that is not going to be easy to describe. The basic plot revolves around the central character "Aces" who is testifying against the mob, and in return has a contract out on his head. Locked away in his suite in Las Vegas, he is protected by the Fed, but there are multiple contract killers (all different from each as can be imagined!) out to get him. First hour seems to be stuck piecing the different contract killers together and their background, whilst the Fed are shown to be trying to figure out what is going on. No one set of actors though gets above the others, and in doing so you have multiple stories in the film tied into the whole premise of the film. Acting is great by the general assemble which includes fine performances by Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta. Problematically, the film tries to be too cool at the start, and reminds me too much of "Things to do in Denver...." and so on. In addition, the film is really confusing at points but is worth persevering with nevertheless. The complexity makes it very original, and you never know where its going, but it wraps up together in the last 30mins which are more than worth the cinema ticket alone. No classic, but enjoyable, original and interesting overall..

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