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Review: Smokin' Aces

28th January 2007

Packed with guns, explosions, blood-filled angst and enough stupid pseudo-gangster names to prop up a whole season of 'The Sopranos' comes a fun, yet ultimately vapid, quest for the heart of Buddy Israel.

A huge departure from writer/director Joe Carnahan, whose acclaimed 'Narc' played on low-budget realism, he hits the absolute opposite end of the crime spectrum with this one. Set against the glitz and glamour of baby Vegas (Lake Tahoe), a bounty of one million dollars is placed on the head of Mob informant Buddy 'Aces' Israel (Jeremy Piven) by a dying Godfather. Thus begins a mad-cap race to be the first to collect the bounty.

All the boxes are ticked on the character front with two grizzled FBI Agents (Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta) charged with getting to Israel before the myriad of gung-ho hit men (and women) succeed in shaking Buddy off his mortal coil. Among the potential killers are: the Tremor Bros, three demented sociopaths; Lazlo Soot, the sophisticated veteran; Pasquall Acosta, a paramilitary with no fingerprints (don't ask), an unknown 'Swede' and Alicia Keys as one half of an achingly stereotypical pair of female 'hood' killers.

Throw in Ben Affleck's band of merry bail-bondsmen and you get an image of the competition out attempting to collect on Israel. And if you're thinking 'that's a lot of people', then you've just uncovered the film's biggest flaw. The sheer amount of introductions needed take the majority of the opening portion of the film, along with tacky name-plates that come across as 'home-movie'.

While attempting to have a principle cast competing with the Polyphonic Spree for numbers, you're never going to be able to truly get behind anyone and so the rare moments of sentimentality are out-of-place and wasted in a picture that would fare much better as a balls-out, Bruckheimer-esque, over-the-top epic. Entertaining but instantly forgettable.

Chris Sloley