>>REVIEW
SMOKING ACES
STARRING Ben Affleck, Jeremy Piven, Alicia Keys, Andy Garcia and Ray Liotta
DIRECTED BY Joe Carnahan
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Millions of spent bullet casings should fall like the first torrential rain of the tropics. Explosions so deafening baboons become extinct as we harvest them for new eardrums. We’re talking adult situations, mature language and gratuitous violence. Oh and boobs. Lots and lots of boobs. Smoking Aces, in its initial spasm of smash cuts and title scenes, promises just that. Despite all its energy and bombastic style, the film fails to deliver on all fronts.
Jeremy Piven plays the Piven-esque Buddy "Aces" Israel, a mid-level magician on the Vegas circuit who made his way up through the Mafioso. A fuckup unable to resist flashing his shit around, the FBI has enough on Aces to get him to snitch. In return, the Mafioso puts a one million dollar bounty on Aces’s head. A colourful cast of specialized murderers and assassins head to Aces’s penthouse suite for what should be some good, old fashioned mayhem.
The aforementioned Piven joins Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Ray Liotta and a whole crew of talented actors who give it their all, lending vitality to their particular caricature. Even neophyte actress Alicia Keys keeps up with the all-star cast (note to horny preteens, you won’t get to see Keys’ boobies), though Common doesn’t fare as well, just looking really jazzed to be in a movie. The Tremor Brothers steal the show as a trio of redneck brothers. What one of them does with Affleck’s mouth deserves some kind of award.
Unfortunately, writer and director Joe Carnahan has no clue what to do with his energetic cast. Scenes haphazardly connect to each other to form a rickety semblance of a plot. Part way through, the film decides it no longer wants to be an adolescent fantasy engine, instead deciding to wear the grown-up clothes of a gritty cop drama. Carnahan seems to have seen the Departed part way through shooting and really wanted to remake it.
Not that we care about plot machinations when we got all these guns around. For a brief moment, the film does what it sets out to do. A gigantic cannon launches FBI agents across hallways, while the Tremor Brothers billow out of an elevator door with chainsaws and shotguns a-roarin’. And then, it stops. For an action movie, it has very little action. Most of the time is spent on posturing. Smoking Aces is a giant tease. It’s akin to that schoolyard fight where two opponents trash talk each other before reading their social studies essays on corrupt policing they copied from NYPD Blue. That’s not what we were promised. |
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