If ever a movie deserved to be called “comic booky” with that meant in the pejorative, it’s got to be Smoking Aces, Joe Carnahan’s tribute to guns, violence and the ability to have a movie without an actual story. Somewhere in this mess of a movie is the unfulfilled promise of a story about a mob stool, the FBI and one of the most interesting and colorful assortments of hitmen to grace the movie screen but it’s all hidden behind guns, explosions, two-dimensional characters and a weirdly placed bunny costume.
Joe Carnahan’s ode to gunplay and violence lacks only one simple thing– a coherent plot. A story is given to the movie– the mob is after Buddy Israel, a Las Vegas entertainer turned mob guy. The FBI is trying to get to him first. That’s the plot. That’s the story. There’s some strange choices made at the end of the movie and an odd revelation on why the mob is really after Israel but the plot is only an excuse to get the colorful hitmen, anarchists, mobsters and FBI agents into a Lake Tahoe hotel to see what kind of cool gunplay that Carnahan can come up with.
Admittedly, once you get beyond the lack of story, the characters and the action are kind of fun in a totally mindless way. Smoking Aces is full of video game violence by cardboard characters. There’s the two female assassins. They have some kind of unspoken love affair going on but it doesn’t get in their way. There’s Ben Affleck, a bail bondsman and his two ex-cop partners who are after Israel for jumping bond. Affleck is pretty amusing in this role, chewing the scenery as much as anyone else in the movie is. There are more and more gunmen, and they are pretty much all colorful, lively and just plain odd. But they’re not characters. They are tools of the director. They lack motivation, personality or depth, or even a purpose other than to pull a trigger over and over and over again.
But Smoking Aces doesn’t require personalities. It’s not that kind of a movie. It’s the kind you give into to, accept it for what it is and try to get swept up in the ride. It doesn’t even have a first or second act. This is all the third act, where everyone gets together and all hell breaks loose. Don’t care what came before hand because there was nothing before this moment.
Smoking Aces isn’t a great movie. It’s not even a good or middling movie. It’s an amusement park ride. It’s a video game. It’s an experience but it’s not a story. It’s one of Buddy Israel card tricks, an illusion making you think that you’re watching a movie while you’re actually getting something else.
its decent movie, i can’t quite remember all of it, i guess it doesn’t fit into *hot* category?