Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Nov 5, 2015 22:03:43 GMT -5
Smokin’ Aces
Dir. Joe Carnahan
Premiered January 26, 2007
After Stomp the Yard, I was originally going to review the Seltzer-Friedberg shitfest Epic Movie and discuss its place in the devolution of parody in film. Then three things happened. First, I hesitated to watch it out of fear that it would embarrass me in front of my roommates and compromise my mental health. Then I realized that I knew nothing about parody in film, having only seen a few parody movies and thus having too little to compare it to. Finally, 🔪 silly buns and @matt1 informed me that Epic Movie wasn’t Seltzer and Friedberg’s breakout film and that they were worried about me. So I skipped it in favor of something more conventionally bad that came out the same weekend.
The reason I wanted to review Smokin’ Aces was because of its trailer. It was a decently enticing ad, promising a flashy, darkly comic shoot-em-up in the style of Pulp Fiction, or at least that brief wave of movies that tried to copy Pulp Fiction.
Well, I don’t know whether to praise the trailer editors or slap them, becaue the movie is none of those things.
Smokin’ Aces is the third feature from director Joe Carnahan, a divisive figure known more recently for introducing master editor Joel Walden to Hollywood. It tells the story of Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven), a Vegas magician and aspiring mafioso who’s set to testify against Primo Sparazza (Joseph Ruskin) the last great mob boss in America, but flees to Lake Tahoe to have one last night of fame and fortune before going into witness protection. Learning of this, Sparazza has hired seven improbably colorful assassins in a competition to find and kill Israel.
Emphasis on “tells the story.” In lieu of a first act, everything I have just written is explained in an 18 1/2-minute infodump by an assortment of characters we don’t yet know or care about. The movie is trying to be frenetic; instead it’s needlessly verbose, impossible to follow, and at times even difficult to hear. And for all that, it’s played totally straight. I’ve never seen any of Carnahan’s other movies, but based on his filmography, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was one of his trademarks.
It doesn’t stop there. Occasionally, two FBI agents will show up (played by Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta), mostly to mumble more exposition. To list the main cast would be pointless; inasmuch as there is one, they consist of a long list of past and future A-listers and at least three members of the cast of Lost, any one of whom would probably have livened the film up had they been given more than two minutes of screentime apiece before being unceremoniously killed off or pushed aside to give the illusion of plot advancement. Perhaps worst of all is Jeremy Piven, the ostensible “star” who gets about as much time on camera as everyone else, and doesn’t get his own scene until well into the film; playing Buddy Israel as an unlikable, empty mishmash of hedonistic bastard clichés.
The trailer for this film made it look like it was trying to be Tarantino, but the actual film seems more like faux-Martin McDonagh. But where McDonagh’s casual cynicism gives his characters weight, Smokin’ Aces is imbued with the most perfunctory kind crassness. I never cared about anything going on in this movie, but I never got the sense that I was meant to. This isn’t a movie; it’s a representation of a type of movie, a generic, copyright-free title to appear on posters in the background of sitcoms...
...And then it becomes something else altogether.
The epilogue of the film ends with a twist that is overserious, contrived, barely foreshadowed, and completely irrelevant to the plot while simultaneously rendering it pointless. Ladies and gentlemen, we have found the ultimate sub-sub-subgenre of the 2000s: the wacky, overstuffed, incomprehensible pseudo-satire that is also a pretentious, inscrutable screed against the US Government. There are only three movies of this kind that I'm aware of. Two of them came out in 2007: this one, and... well, if you've seen it, you know what it's going to be. For the rest of you, stick around.
Also in Theaters:
- Blood and Chocolate, an obscure German YA adaptation that was critically reviled and flopped hard, and which I only just learned exists.
- Catch and Release, a Jennifer Garner rom-com that similarly crashed and burned with critics and audiences.
Additional Notes:
- Sign that this was made in 2007: Taraji P. Henson (doing a blaxploitation riff on Valerie Solanas) refers to Israel’s prostitutes as “hoochies.” A totally random child character issues the greeting "what up, dick?"
- It seems that Joe Carnahan and I share some personal history. Both of us majored at film at San Francisco State University before transferring to a different CSU closer to our respective families, and both of us are the children of an Irish father and Jewish mother. Weird.
- That’s it for January. But the winter doesn’t end until March 21st, meaning we’re still in for some bad movies. Some of it you probably don’t remember, quite a lot of it is famously bad. But 2007 is still the greatest year in American cinema, and one movie...well, you just wait.
Next Time: Norbit