Smokin' Aces reviewed by Sam Osborn
The eleven-year old boy inside of me, the one that glues glow-in-the-dark stars to his ceiling and watches Saturday morning cartoons, adores Joe Carnahan's new picture Smokin' Aces. It's a directorial release; an indulgence of the gag reflex, satisfying all the itching twitches of any filmmaker working in the action genre. It's riddled with contrivance and clichés from other, better pictures, but Smokin' Aces imitates with ingenuity and cunning. It's strong and dark in its humor, even managing to rend some authentic tears from its players. Mr. Carnahan lashes out with this picture, bloodying his resume with a work of style and violence and the colorful upchuck of the iconic hit-man character through all its iterations.
The film works a little like Snatchor any of Guy Ritchie's pictures for that matter--but Snatch diagnosed with violent psychosis: about a dozen contract killers, none of whom are colorless, are hired to kill Buddy "Aces" Israel. The first to do so receives $1,000,000. The specifics of the deal are fuzzy, mumbled fast and spitfire like an episode of "24" with the volume down, but the basics find Aces (Jeremy Piven) mixed up with the wrong mob boss and an upcoming testimony. Working to protect Aces are Agent Carruthers and Agent Messner (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds), woven into a red-tape FBI bureaucracy by Stanley Locke (Andy Garcia), their boss. Anyway, word about the hit going down on Buddy Aces Israel gets around quick and soon more flavors of hit-man than a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop are running around, all looking to remove Israel's heart (one of the conditions of the contract). And so the title is more clever and synoptic than we might've originally realized: the film really is just about smokin' Aces.
It's too easy to rest on elitist laurels with a low-level January release like Smokin' Aces and write it off as cheap imitation. Any goof can see hints of Tarantino and Rodriguez, a sprinkling of Natural Born Killers, a dusting of The Usual Suspects, whispers of grindhouse projects from the seventies, and a full helping of Snatch. But how many space crusades or otherworldly enraptures can be deemed unique and bearing no resemblance to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings? Film-making is imitation; be it an imitation of reality or of the unreality of an action flick. Smokin' Aces is an imitation of the snaps, bangs, and bullet-wounds of the action genre, sometimes even doubling back on itself in realization of its shameless furor. The fun lies in its persistence. With all its characters and neat tricks for piling up body bags, you can't help but imagine Mr. Carnahan running slack-jawed through a toy store, plucking ideas and scenes from the shelves of earlier story lines, glomming them together into this furious amalgam.
Anyway, the method works, if inconsistently. As in Snatch, story plays second fiddle to style, which is the big, mean ball-hog of the court. But as he proved with his earlier film, Narc (a much quieter, reserved cop picture), Carnahan has a thickened grasp of the medium. Without diving too deep into shop-talk here, he doesn't rely on the close-up or long-shot, doesn't colorize and over-saturate to annoyance, and essentially handles his camera like a sensible, dynamic filmmaker. The film's style is instead a product of the characters, drawing Hitler mustaches onto their faces with Sharpies, blasting off .50 caliber bullets between resort hotels, and fending off kung-fu crazed, backwater adolescents (just don't ask). Problems arise when, in between all the satisfying nonsense, Carnahan drops neatly wrapped packages of storyline. Convoluted and unnecessarily complicated, the story loops about near the end and almost loses us in the backlash.
Even more unnerving, however, are the affectations the characters have weaseled into us by the film's end. More than a dozen characters enter the resort Buddy Aces Israel is holed up in, but scant few manage to make it out. Their deaths are sometimes comical (one character has trouble wielding his chainsaw and ends up using it as an impromptu chair, for instance), but other times their deaths are troubling. Carnahan's script works best in its scenes of dialogue, which trickle almost to a halt as the bullets start flying through the extended climax; scenes with Jason Batemen as a self-deprecating lawyer, Taraji Henson as the lesbian assassin swooning over Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck and his band of reluctant barfly cronies, and Jeremy Piven spinning cards and pleading to his partner, Common. Smokin' Aces works like magic--original, unique magic--when it's not running guns blazing. And when the characters start dropping, and when Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds take spotlight, the tone turns from a blood-toothed grin to heavy-eyed sorrow. It's melodrama, and it's solemn enough to make some of the audience laugh in repulsion. But it's an intelligent step away from the exploitation material (genuinely satisfying as it is) that the rest of the film flings at us; and its end result is affecting and bizarrely human. And to make any character from Smokin' Aces seem human, if only for a scene or two, is something worth mentioning indeed.
Sam Osborn
The eleven-year old boy inside of me, the one that glues glow-in-the-dark stars to his ceiling and watches Saturday morning cartoons, adores Joe Carnahan's new picture Smokin' Aces. It's a directorial release; an indulgence of the gag reflex, satisfying all the itching twitches of any filmmaker working in the action genre. It's riddled with contrivance and clichés from other, better pictures, but Smokin' Aces imitates with ingenuity and cunning. It's strong and dark in its humor, even managing to rend some authentic tears from its players. Mr. Carnahan lashes out with this picture, bloodying his resume with a work of style and violence and the colorful upchuck of the iconic hit-man character through all its iterations.
The film works a little like Snatchor any of Guy Ritchie's pictures for that matter--but Snatch diagnosed with violent psychosis: about a dozen contract killers, none of whom are colorless, are hired to kill Buddy "Aces" Israel. The first to do so receives $1,000,000. The specifics of the deal are fuzzy, mumbled fast and spitfire like an episode of "24" with the volume down, but the basics find Aces (Jeremy Piven) mixed up with the wrong mob boss and an upcoming testimony. Working to protect Aces are Agent Carruthers and Agent Messner (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds), woven into a red-tape FBI bureaucracy by Stanley Locke (Andy Garcia), their boss. Anyway, word about the hit going down on Buddy Aces Israel gets around quick and soon more flavors of hit-man than a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop are running around, all looking to remove Israel's heart (one of the conditions of the contract). And so the title is more clever and synoptic than we might've originally realized: the film really is just about smokin' Aces.
It's too easy to rest on elitist laurels with a low-level January release like Smokin' Aces and write it off as cheap imitation. Any goof can see hints of Tarantino and Rodriguez, a sprinkling of Natural Born Killers, a dusting of The Usual Suspects, whispers of grindhouse projects from the seventies, and a full helping of Snatch. But how many space crusades or otherworldly enraptures can be deemed unique and bearing no resemblance to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings? Film-making is imitation; be it an imitation of reality or of the unreality of an action flick. Smokin' Aces is an imitation of the snaps, bangs, and bullet-wounds of the action genre, sometimes even doubling back on itself in realization of its shameless furor. The fun lies in its persistence. With all its characters and neat tricks for piling up body bags, you can't help but imagine Mr. Carnahan running slack-jawed through a toy store, plucking ideas and scenes from the shelves of earlier story lines, glomming them together into this furious amalgam.
Anyway, the method works, if inconsistently. As in Snatch, story plays second fiddle to style, which is the big, mean ball-hog of the court. But as he proved with his earlier film, Narc (a much quieter, reserved cop picture), Carnahan has a thickened grasp of the medium. Without diving too deep into shop-talk here, he doesn't rely on the close-up or long-shot, doesn't colorize and over-saturate to annoyance, and essentially handles his camera like a sensible, dynamic filmmaker. The film's style is instead a product of the characters, drawing Hitler mustaches onto their faces with Sharpies, blasting off .50 caliber bullets between resort hotels, and fending off kung-fu crazed, backwater adolescents (just don't ask). Problems arise when, in between all the satisfying nonsense, Carnahan drops neatly wrapped packages of storyline. Convoluted and unnecessarily complicated, the story loops about near the end and almost loses us in the backlash.
Even more unnerving, however, are the affectations the characters have weaseled into us by the film's end. More than a dozen characters enter the resort Buddy Aces Israel is holed up in, but scant few manage to make it out. Their deaths are sometimes comical (one character has trouble wielding his chainsaw and ends up using it as an impromptu chair, for instance), but other times their deaths are troubling. Carnahan's script works best in its scenes of dialogue, which trickle almost to a halt as the bullets start flying through the extended climax; scenes with Jason Batemen as a self-deprecating lawyer, Taraji Henson as the lesbian assassin swooning over Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck and his band of reluctant barfly cronies, and Jeremy Piven spinning cards and pleading to his partner, Common. Smokin' Aces works like magic--original, unique magic--when it's not running guns blazing. And when the characters start dropping, and when Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds take spotlight, the tone turns from a blood-toothed grin to heavy-eyed sorrow. It's melodrama, and it's solemn enough to make some of the audience laugh in repulsion. But it's an intelligent step away from the exploitation material (genuinely satisfying as it is) that the rest of the film flings at us; and its end result is affecting and bizarrely human. And to make any character from Smokin' Aces seem human, if only for a scene or two, is something worth mentioning indeed.
Sam Osborn