Smokin' Aces

by KYW's Bill Wine
 

The title notwithstanding, don't expect a winning hand.

Smokin' Aces is a blackly comic thriller, a manically complicated and ultraviolent "crimedy" about a group of hitmen and hitwomen who descend on a snitch to play a round of "Stomp on the Stool Pigeon."
        
A dying mobster takes out a million-dollar contract on his former protege, Buddy "Aces" Israel, played by Jeremy Piven, a standup comedian/magician-turned-gangster who has agreed to turn state's evidence and testify against the Las Vegas mob.

The FBI, hoping to use the small-potatoes illusionist to bring down the Mafia honcho, places Aces in protective custody, in the care of two agents, played by Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds, and under the supervision of agent Andy Garcia, at his Lake Tahoe, Nevada hideout.

When word gets out of the steep price on the informant's noggin, a bunch of lowlifes join the hunt in hopes of getting Aces in their hand and preventing him from reaching the witness stand.

The avalanche of assassins, degenerates, and sociopaths includes bounty hunter Ben Affleck and contract killers Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson, as well as neo-Nazis and torture experts.         

The writer and director is Joe Carnahan, who made a modest splash with Narc in 2002.  But the title of his 1998 debut feature would have fit this project like a glove: Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane.

The terminally hip Smokin' Aces has so much cartoonishly over-the-top violence, we stop taking any of it seriously long before it's over.

Carnage-loving Carnahan interweaves several tales into a flashback-heavy jigsaw narrative, kicked off with endless, impossible-to-digest exposition.

He employs a rat-a-tat, Excedrin Headache Number 9 editing rhythm, and uses bloody gunfights along the way as if they were song-and-dance numbers in a musical, or more aptly, action sequences in gun porn.

When it's all over, the plot holes you wondered about during the mayhem still sit there, gaping enough for the entire audience to exit through.

The ensemble cast provides a dash of uneven but tangible color, but there are so many characters in this crowded landscape, and they're so sketchily delineated, we never get beyond the shallowest of surfaces.

As for narrative clarity and character development, they never even get to reach for their guns.

And the director's desperate grab for an emotional payoff at film's end is way too little and much too late, as he seems to fly a sequence in from another movie.

Energetic and trendily stylish (in a throwback sort of way) but insubstantial, Smokin' Aces doesn't have much going for it beyond its parade of high-energy shoot-em-up sequences and its considerable body count.

If Guy Ritchie is the director Carnahan is emulating, his work is similarly headachy and incoherent.  But if the pulpy Tarantino/Scorsese vein is what he's after, it's still well out of reach.

So we'll squeeze off 2 stars out of 4 for the trigger-happy and make-it-snappy kitcsh-kitcsch-bang-bang-a-thon, Smokin' Aces.

Some of the action in this exercise in excess may be smokin', but who the deuce we're supposed to root for, care about, or understand remains a mystery.