Smokin' Aces
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: February 11, 2007

Matthew Fox is perhaps the least convincing actor on TV’s mostly awesome ensemble drama, Lost. So imagine my delight when his cameo became the highlight of Joe Carnahan’s mostly awful ensemble movie Smokin’ Aces. With maybe four minutes of screen time, Fox manages to do what no one else in the film can: He creates a personality. His straight arrow security guard is not merely the only likeable character in the movie; he is the only character of any kind. He’s also doomed—it gives nothing away to reveal this. He gets dispatched, and before his body is cold, his killer is engaging in “offbeat” behavior, and the film is back on its breakneck, boring, blundering track. I tip my cap to you, Mathew Fox. To shine in this movie, you truly are a star.

Smokin’ Aces doesn’t even pretend to have a plot, until maybe the last fifteen minutes, at which point its plot pretends to have a twist. The filmmakers essentially work from a Cannonball Run template, shifting their attention rapidly from one group of weird and snazzy nihilists to another, hoping to out-maneuver the audience’s bullshit detector. These characters have attitudes instead of personalities, they speak glibly of serious things, they commit blasé and stylish killings, and they get riddled with bullets, but don’t die. They are accompanied, wherever they go, by a soundtrack of electric piano riffs and conga grooves, and they descend on Lake Tahoe, all of them looking to collect a million dollar bounty on a Vegas-entertainer-turned-gangster-wannabe-turned-FBI-informant who is holed up in a casino penthouse with a deck of cards, a lot of cocaine, and a harem of hookers. Groovy music, hired killers, hip clothes, flying bullets, card tricks, cocaine, and hookers. These are the filmmakers’ resources. It stimulates the senses just to read off a list of them. And yet somehow they have been whipped into this snore-fest of a movie. Now that, Joe Carnahan, is genuine irony.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Hey, I like a movie that looks like a music video and behaves like a video game.” Well, folks, Smokin’ Aces has something to disappoint you too. Let’s talk about a directorial technique called “betraying the tone of your own movie.” Correct me if I’m young, but it seems to me this malfeasance was pioneered by Brian DePalma, with his 1987 film The Untouchables. In that film we were reveling in bloodshed one minute, and in the next we were required to indulge Kevin Costner in a tearful “Why’d ya make me do it?” speech to one of the bad guys he had just filled with lead. Dude, get your drama out of my popcorn.

Now, with Smokin’ Aces, Joe Carnahan pumps the same stunt full of steroids. After saturating us for ninety minutes with the glorious pulverization of human gristle, he closes his film by forcing us to watch the surviving characters break down and cry for their fallen comrades. Yuk. I don’t get it, Joe. Five minutes ago, bloody carnage was a hoot. 

People will call this stuff garbage, but actually it's recyclables. It’s what the critics call “Tarantino-esque,” because apparently Quentin Tarantino should be held synonymous with the army of clumsy filmmakers who keep trying to imitate the more superficial attributes of his movies. Meanwhile any Tarantino film has more wit and craftsmanship in the outer rim of its spiraling creativity than this film has in its whole gaseous hoax of an identity.

So here are some tips for the next video store clerk with a camera and a dream. To be truly “Tarantino-esque,” you must first create characters; only then it will be possible to generate any tension between them. You must feed our long attention spans with conversations, and with images that please us; consider your use of color, lighting, and composition. You may reference other films, but you must do so with wit; mere sycophantism will come across as pathetic. And that’s about it. It’s simple, which—be warned—is not the same as easy. But if you can do all that, then you can hose us down with blood. And then you can laugh at all the directors out there who got the punch line, but didn’t get the joke.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld