Film Review: Smokin’ Aces

I realize that pop culture’s patience to celebrate nostalgia grows shorter with each passing decade, but I think it’s still a little too early to look back fondly on the late ‘90s and revel in their spirit.

Sadly, neither VH1 nor writer/director Joe Carnahan seem to agree with me. The former has given us I Love the ‘90s clip shows, and the latter has given us a “Wow, wasn’t Pulp Fiction the greatest? I bet I could make a movie with clever dialogue and seedy criminals that’s just like that! Only different!” style film, of the sort that we (thankfully) haven’t seen much of in this decade.

Carnahan, whose previous work includes effective police melodrama Narc and little-seen Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, is clearly channeling his inner Tarantino. But his film is as much of a mildly retarded Ocean’s Eleven knock-off as it is a Pulp Fiction wannabe.

Like Steven Soderbergh’s remake, nearly every member of the cast is an instantly recognizable celebrity, only instead of A-List Hollywood royalty and respected actors, Carnahan settles for the B-, C-, D- and K-List. Like O11, Carnahan’s spends a lot of time going over complicated plans to commit a high-paying crime in Las Vegas, but with considerably less grace and panache.

Of course, Smokin’ Aces telegraphs its meat-headed would-be hipness in with its very title—pronouncing whole words is for nerds, yo.

The “Aces” refers to Vegas stage magician Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven). Popular with the mob, he became something of an amateur Mafioso, then tried cutting a deal with the feds to rat his former friends out. The mob wants him dead, naturally enough, so they put a one million dollar bounty on his head, making him the “great white whale of snitches.” A small army of colorful killers and cadres of cops converge on the penthouse suite where he’s holed up, doing cocaine and prostitutes while waiting for his lawyer Curtis Armstrong (You know him as “that guy who played Booger”) to finish negotiating with the feds.

Got all that? If not, there are no less than three consecutive expositional sequences during the first twenty minutes of the film to explain, re-explain and then re-re-explain it to you.

Seeking to “smoke” Aces are Alicia Keys and her partner Taraji Henson, a scarred master of disguise (Tommy Flanagan), a heavily mustachioed ex-CIA torture expert (Nestor Carbonell), and the heavily tattooed, chainsaw wielding, totally mad Mad Max escapees The Tremor Brothers (led by Chris Pine), who apparently travel everywhere with their own cleverly concealed smoke machine and noise/metal soundtrack.

Also are a trio of bail bondsmen lead by Ben Affleck and FBI agents Ryan Reynolds, Ray Liotta and Andy Garcia. In the periphery of the action are bodyguard Common, head of hotel security Matthew Fox, lawyer Justin Bateman and Wayne Newton as himself.

It all seems simple enough—there’s this guy, and all these other people with guns want to kill or capture him—but Carnahan can’t seem to quit setting the story up. Each character is introduced with a long, rambling story that one character tells another, set over a flashback montage, to the point where most of the movie’s actual storytelling is done in long, rambling voiceovers set over flashback montages.

By the time all the pieces are in place for a blow-out climax, Carnahan rushes awkwardly through the shooting and the killing and then proceeds with several melodramatic death scenes that tonally clash with the rest of the film, and then it’s on to an overlong dénouement including a pulled-out-of-thin-air reveal that seems to belong in another film entirely.

The film does offer some rewards to a patient viewer willing to put up with a lot of crap. There are several isolated scenes of well-orchestrated violence and morbid, almost absurd humor, but these are embedded into a film that’s laboriously told and, therefore, quite a labor just to get through.

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