Smokin' Aces: Critic Reviews

You can't take it seriously, but the movie is as lively as it is debased.

Smokin Aces is a Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.

Four years ago, US writer-director Joe Carnahan gave us the tough and unsentimental cop drama Narc. Now he has followed it up with a fatuous piece of nasty nonsense without a smidgen of that film's intelligence.

It wants to be a Tarantino-esque dark comedy about gun-slinging, substance-abusing lowlifes. But instead it's a convoluted, slap-happy, humorless bloodfest.

Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

Self-important but not untalented, Smokin' Aces is tonally consistent from beginning to end, and, for all its bloody mayhem, kinetic nihilism, and jive minstrelsy, has a surprisingly light touch.

Violence is spread throughout the film, and some of it is entertaining, I have to admit. But the climax at Buddy's Tahoe penthouse is Tarantino on speed.

It's ludicrous, but not as ludicrous as the ending -- an exhausting game of Twister that'll leave you feeling stupid or cheated or both.

This movie is meant to be watched the way a video game is played: just go from scene to scene and start blasting the minute you walk through the door.

Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.

When Carnahan tries to tug at our emotions, he just compounds the whorish insensitivity of the movie.

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan can't tell a story worth a damn -- especially not a complicated mishmash like this one.

But Smokin' Aces is all pumped up with no place to go, and the crashing letdown, as the rush fades and the ammo shells lie spent across the screen, is heavy indeed.

If you're fond of the old 'Is he dead yet' gimmick, there are lots of those.

Meaningless violence incarnate, a pointed mix of laughs and wanton death; and yes, that might actually mean something, but precisely what is never clear.

Smokin Aces achieves a level of vicarious thrill, but it's all peaks and valleys, with lows that are too low and highs that are too high.

Smokin' Aces blows some cool smoke rings until it makes the very un-cool mistake of overstaying its welcome.

Impersonal hackwork by someone who is bending over backwards to sell out and become the new Michael Bay.

Putting Ben Affleck, and the poor man's Ben Affleck, Ryan Reynolds, in the same movie? Not a good move.

This is from the same Joe Carnahan who impressed mightily with his Sundance hit Narc, a tale of murder and police corruption that was lean, focussed and spellbinding -- everything that Smokin' Aces isn't. What the hell happened?

Smokin' Aces may be packing a lot of heat but its unnecessarily convoluted story means it's mostly a lot of hot air.

A gruesome Cannonball Run with Piven flesh as the trophy, Smokin' Aces is a depressingly nihilistic entry in the Tarantino/Guy Ritchie/Ocean's Eleven caper genre.

Smokin' Aces is Tarantino lite -- a vague and unsuccessful attempt to bring together a bunch of offbeat, unrelated characters in a situation where a bloody resolution is inescapable.