You know how that Bobby movie came out last year and it bombed at the box office? You know how the critics got all whimpery and pissy because they all said that there were too many big name actors being stuffed into the cast like so many fuzzy rodents in Richard Gere’s poop chute? Well, Smokin’ Aces has the same issue. If you thought Spider-Man 3 was trying too hard to be a clusterfuck of a flick, it can only look up to Smokin’ Aces and pray at it’s bedside each night (with it’s stupid little Care Bears sheets) that it can one day hope to be as big a fucking car wreck as this movie.
Don’t let the big dollar sign names slapped on the posters trick you, because at its chewy nougat center, Smokin’ Aces easily falls under the banner of a bad movie, no “ifs”, “ands” or “asses” about it. It’s about a Vegas illusionist dick monger (played by Captain Dickhead himself, Jeremy “Mutiny on the Dickboat” Piven, who leaves DVDs of his dick-baking show “Entourage” as tips for waiters in restaurants) named Buddy “Aces” Israel, who gets his pecker wet in the Mafioso business like he’s Frank “Slappy” Sinatra. Buddy (who’s also the deadliest playing card thrower this side of the X-Man Gambit) decides to take over half the organized crime shit in Sin City for himself though, and when his dirty dick stinkin’ hand is caught in the cock jar one too many times, his ass is gonna get busted wide open like a pedophile’s Hershey highway in a Rykers shower room. Israel pleads a deal with the FBI though in exchange for his testimony against the mob bosses and as such the underworld puts a hit out on the pole monkey’s coked out skull: 1,000,000 samoleans for the person who brings back Buddy’s heart before he takes the Cosa Nostra down shit creek with him. The award brings in a rogues gallery of hired killers and that’s where the fun begins.
Gunning for Buddy are the following freaks, weirdoes and thrill killers: three plain shirts bounty hunters led by Ben Affleck; two ghetto booty broads climbing the hired assassin later; a torture happy demento whose psychosis makes him as deadly as his ability to corpse people up; a master-of-disguise type who’s the best in the business at the game of subterfuge; and a trio of Neo-Nazi heavy metal hillbilly brothers called the Tremors who don’t care how many casualties they have to chainsaw and shotgun their skinned heads through to take out their mark. The only guys standing between Buddy and this colorful gaggle of killmeisters are three of Mr. Israel’s loyal goons and a posse of expendable FBI field agents that are guaranteed to leave some pretty red smears on the walls of Aces’ luxury hotel crash pad once the shit hits the fan… no, forget the fans, what happens here is more like the output of Detroit’s busiest sewage treatment facility getting firehosed over a set of helicopter blades! I get the feeling it might have worked better in comic book form.
We get a lot of colorful characters, which are fun to watch as they run around killing each other, blowing away extras and generally painting the place crimson, either with their own viscera or that of whomever happens to get caught in their crossfire. The problem with the movie (beyond the awkward jumping back and forth between converging stories and the needlessly complicated last 20-or-so minutes) is that there are a few too many characters and the writers seem dead set on trying to flesh each one out, in turn stretching each so thin that most border on the transparent and depend entirely on the actors playing them to make us give a shit. The ones that this actually does work on are few and far between of course, because despite the eclectic troupe of talented thespians we’re saddling with, at least 8-out-of-10 are just here to pay the rent and couldn’t care less about bringing any legitimacy to this little orgy of theirs. Jason Bateman is the standout as the disturbingly comical, uhm, guy… I don’t even remember what he was doing there but I know it was funny and he didn’t get nearly enough screen time. Affleck was okay, Andy Garcia was okay, Ray Liotta looked like he wanted to try harder but his agent told him he wasn’t getting paid enough to “try harder” so he just kinda sits there perched on the line between good and lazy, Ryan Reynolds comes out of nowhere as probably the best of the group and musical guests Common and Alicia Keyes both pull an equally pleasant surprise as two more cast members who actually made the effort and are no doubt looking for something good to start off their film resumes. As much as Jeremy Piven is a dick burger (notice my running theme of variations on how this guy is a DICK), that’s what the role required so he was pretty much getting paid to not so much act as to be himself. Beyond that, I sadly need to recognize Dick McCheese’s dedication to the part by actually learning card tricks. That’s right kids, that shit ain’t computer generated, it’s all real… but he’s still the vale-dick-torian of Dickface Community College.
Oh yeah, on a final note, if you got a pants loading kick out of that freakish little albino ninja “PANCAKES!” kid in Cabin Fever, keep your peepers peeled when the weird little white kid named Warren shows up. This kid will have you looking at your friend/loved one/partner in deviance/pet with a “What the fuck is that all about?!” expression every time he makes it onto the screen. Holy shit that kid needs shock therapy and a solid backhand from John McEnroe…
