Smokin’ Aces

Released: 01/26/07

Viewed: 2:20 pm 01/27/07

Starring: Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Common Joseph Ruskin, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys, Ray Liotta, Peter Berg, Ryan Reynolds, Martin Henderson, Taraji P. Henson, Jeremy Piven

Directed by: Joe Carnahan

Universal Pictures Official Site of the Movie

I’m not making it up, even CNN was reporting on the rumoured feud between long time friends and co-stars John Cusack and Jeremy Piven. This all started because of an interview Piven gave to Best Life Magazine where he insinuated that Cusack might not be as supportive of his success as Piven was for him. Cusack tells People Magazine a different story, but society likes to assume the worst before they bother to read the truth so instead of quoting it, I’ll let you check out the articles for yourself.

What do I think is true? It doesn’t matter. The movies they made together are awesome. The movies they make apart are awesome too, though I admit I love a great Cusack/Piven team-up and hope that the feud is fabricated if it means the two will share the screen again. The chemistry is there, there’s no denying it, and I’d hate to think we’d never see the same magic that made movies like Grosse Point Blank, Serendipity, and Say Anything that much better. I chose a side in the comic but never would in real life. Separate or apart they’re both way too much fun to watch.

Every now and then there’s a movie that comes along that isn’t trying to impress you with its witty repartee, poignant symbolism, or dramatic undertones. Every now and then a movie wants to do nothing else but blow the skin of your face and the hair off your ass. A movie that will hit you with so much manly adrenaline that immediately upon leaving the theater you’ll sign up for a lumberjack competition. A movie that’s so cool you will pretend not to care about losing that lumberjack competition because that’s how cool “not caring� is. Smokin’ Aces is that kind of movie and it starts off 2007 with a deafening and literal BANG!

The story is simple. A hit has been put on the head of Buddy “Aces� Israel (Jeremy Poiven), a Vegas headliner that has gotten in a little too deep with the Nevada crime world for his own good. He agrees to turn state’s evidence and testify against the mob, which bumps up the price tag on his head unleashing a slew of hitmen, ex-cops, bail bonds men, gangsters, and FBI agents eager to either protecting or slaughtering this marked man.

The FBI puts Israel up in the penthouse of a hotel where the majority of the movie takes place, but I gotta say, I felt like there were some missed opportunities here. There’s plenty of explosions and gunplay, which is great, but as soon as they got the target into a stable environment it should have been time to define the situation. Show the audience the room Israel is in and all the ways to access it. Show the audience the army of manpower and technology protecting him from the killers that are after him. Then you show the audience how for the hitman approach this dilemma in their own way.

I was looking for them to lay out ground rules the way Ocean’s Eleven or Mission Impossible have done so well in the past. At one point the head of the security tells us how many security guards are on the floor and that a key card is needed to access the penthouse by elevator, but I guess I was looking for grand stories of security cameras, heat sensitive panelling, password codes, laser detectors… that sort of thing. Realistically a hotel like the one in this film isn’t going to have that kind of beefed up security but when you find out at the end of the movie that you could get to the floor by stairs, all the drama about its accessibility is gone. Because if all that’s required to get on that floor is lifting your legs and pushing on a door, then I could be up there. And if I could be up there, then this is not a difficult hit.

I really believe that the hotel should have been its own character. Layout and access points should have been over explained to the point where the characters had more options and the audience had a better understanding of the environment. I’m not saying it should have been easy for the killers to reach Israel, but there’s got to be more than one way in.

This is just me nitpicking how I want it to be, but of course it’s great the way it is. They manage to make the one access point a pretty dangerous place to be, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. If the movie truly suffers from anything it’s that it’s too cool and there’s just not enough time to showcase it all. Every character introduced is one that you instantly want to know more about, but as the cast list keeps growing the movie quickly becomes a delicate juggling act of time management in featuring everyone equally and still moving along the story. The result is entertaining but noticeably rocky.

Obviously certain moments and storylines take precedence and have to be featured, but the result is that you’ve got some characters waiting around for the plot to catch up with them. Most glaring was a trio of Mad-Maxed maniacs called the Tremor Brothers who take just under 35 minutes to travel the two dozen floors from the lobby to the penthouse of the hotel where Israel is staying. Granted, a building-wide shut down of power accounts for a portion of their stay, but on my second viewing I clocked their time in a working elevator at just under 16 minutes, which is ridiculously long. You get the impression that they could have gotten to the top faster if they had scaled the building rather then submit themselves to this hamster-on-a-wheel time trap.

I understand the problem the filmmakers were presented with. This is the type of movie where certain characters need to be in certain places at certain times to create appropriate tension and excitement, doesn’t leave much wiggle room for time. For the most part the tension and excitement are there, but in a movie with so much going on, those “hurry up and wait� moments can’t be so obvious.

The easy solution to this is to have the narrative jump around through time. That way you can represent multiple things happening at the same instance showing just how hectic the situation is. But I think this Tarantino approach would have hurt Aces in the long run, if only in the endless comparisons it would have received. Plus the chronological storytelling will actually help the audience stay on track and keep things in order, which they’ll be grateful for when it’s time for Andy Garcia to explain the big twist. You don’t want to sacrifice the clarity of the ending just to make someone’s trip on an elevator shorter. As is I don’t think Aces has anything genuinely unique to offer, but director Joe Carnahan doesn’t use any cheap tricks in telling a bold, bloody, larger-than-life, homage to testosterone. And it’s a lot of fun.

Smokin’ Aces is fast, loud and unapologetic with its violence. Fingers go missing, rivers of blood are born, and the biggest sniper rifle I’ve ever seen will launch you across the room with its victims. And you’ll be smiling the whole time. Then just when you think you’ve seen it all… a security guard on fire runs across screen.

On one hand that’s completely ludicrous. “Man on fire� is the equivalent of “everything and the kitchen sink� when it comes to an action movie, but you have to appreciate the commitment they made to not taking themselves too seriously and just deciding to have fun with it. Some of these characters are beyond unrealistic. One of the hitmen has spring-loaded weapons in his sleeve for Christ’s sake, but it all fits in with the tone of the film. A tone that, with its bright colors, flashy editing and extreme angles, could at times be confused for a Mountain Dew commercial. You know what I mean - “X-treme�. But what keeps it from being offensively annoying is that it’s just too cool for school. Every time it feels like it might be too much, someone gets dead in some excessive way or Common shows up and acts smooth. It’s a wonderful balancing act between commercial appeal and genuine awesomeness.

What I like most about the film is that it knows what it is and doesn’t pretend to be something else. It’s not a revolutionary or epic piece of film but it is sincerely fun. Rowdy and abrasive in all the right ways. And even though it won’t change the way you look at modern action movies it will change the way you look at Alicia Keys. Good gravy, as long as she’s wearing that outfit, she could kill me any day of the week.

Rating: 7 out of 10 - This is one where I could keep talking about it. I didn’t even scratch the surface of the characters, which would have been pretty hard to do without going into some great spoilers. Perhaps a DVD review is in order. I will say though that I was really impressed that Ryan Reynolds was able to pull off the “I need a medic!� line, without looking like a total jackass.

I think the man in me needs to own this on DVD. Plus judging from all the content on the movies web site, there’s a good indication that the DVD will be packed with a ton of DVD worthy extras. But I digress. Check out the “Recommended� section bellow for more reasons why I think this one might be worth your money on home video.

With all the COOL going on in this movie there’s never enough time to get to know the whole cast. The Internet comes to the rescue where on the main site for Smokin’ Aces I found a collection of short comic strips featuring the characters before they appeared in the movie. See some of these great hitmen’s missions before they all set their sites on Buddy Israel. Comics are a cheap way to tell a good back-story, and it also doubles as a direct pipeline to Smokin’s target audience who were probably reading comics earlier today anyway. It’s a nice marriage of medium, and with so many great characters I can imagine just how many great stories there are to tell. I’d love to see a sequel, but if the money isn’t there, let’s get some more comics!

If comics aren’t your thing (then how did you end up here?) you might find more to enjoy in director Joe Carnahan’s production blog kept during the process of making Smokin’ Aces. There’s a lot of fun stuff in here, a nice behind the scenes look and some fun on set videos, but what really appealed to me were some of the great concepts for the poster design of the movie. I love what they ended up with but there is some truly hyper-violent, slick, style in some of those rejected pieces. Worth a look for sure.

Snatch - One of the biggest things I’ve heard is a lot of people saying about Smokin’ Aces is that it wasn’t what they were expecting and that they were a little disappointed with it. You know, I kind of felt the same way to the point where I decided to see it a second time to see if knowing what happens would help the experience for me. And I think it did. A second look definitely allows you to appreciate some of the finer jokes, dialogue, and dismemberment going on in this very fast paced film.

I experienced this same thing with Guy Richie’s film Snatch. I think I wanted it to be Fight Club because of Pitt and… it just wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. It was its own thing, and this is just another case of me being beaten by my own expectations. On DVD I came to love the twisted story, slick editing and infinite characters with their delightful accents and aggressive tendencies. It’s become one of those movies I can just put on and enjoy for what it is.

Aces shares a similar criminal theme and something tells me that it also will replay beautifully on DVD. I’m sure that in no time I’ll be over-quoting Bateman’s “pop it, lock it, slide it, and put the chain on.� line.

I’ve been quoted. I’m not good enough to have a wiki entry but I’m at a point now where I’m being quoted on people’s books. That’s pretty cool. Kyle from Silent Boy e-mailed me up last week and asked me if he could quote me on something I said in the forums about his strip a couple months back. I checked out his strip again and agreed, still it was very cool of him to ask. With the Internet, people say so much stuff and they can barely remember saying any of it at all. Had I stumbled upon his book at a convention and seen my name as a way of advertisement I might have gotten angry, but he did the right thing and I was more than happy to comply. Check out Silent Boy to see why I’m so quotable these days.

Did you hate the Smokin’ Aces comic, or the one for Catch and Release? Or did you love them both!? Well if you’d like to have your voice heard be sure to call in tonight to the weekly Digital Pimpcast where Phil, Kevin and I discuss these, and all the other Digital Pimp strips from the last week. Feel free to tune in and listen or call in and let us know what you think. If you’re mean though we’ll most likely hang up on you and make fun of you in the following weeks comic. But it’s all in good fun. Check it out every Wednesday at 10. Later.