Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

“Smokin’ Aces” (2007)

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Satisfaction:Frustrated Tags: Action, Violence

Smokin’ Aces is basically Rat Race meets Domino. Unfortunately, I found Rat Race to be lame, and I liked Domino until I actually started thinking about the movie.

The story’s simple: Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel (Jeremy Piven), a Las Vegas magician with Sinatra-esque connections to the mob decides to testify against them, promising to name names. The mob gets wind and decides to put a hit on Aces, asking literally for his heart. Flocking to the job’s million-dollar reward are a plethora of hitmen (and women) that include Jack Dupree (Ben Affleck) and his posse, lesbians Georgia Sykes (Alicia Keys) and Sharice Watters (Taraji P. Henson), and of course “The Swede” (Vladimir Kulich). A terrified Aces hides out in a hotel suite, and as the race to kill him ensues, so does the race to extract him, led by two FBI agents, Richard Messner (Ryan Reynolds) and Donald Carruthers (Ray Liotta).

I feel like Jeremy Piven kind of owes me something. I was watching him back when he was making pitiable made-for-cable films where he played the meek schlub who somehow managed to nab the movie star girl of his dreams. I was watching him back when he was the nerdy sidekick, and I remember being a lone fan. All of a sudden Entourage exploded, everyone loves him (still including me), but now this guy can’t play any other role. The Smokin’ Aces Piven is basically a down-on-his-luck Ari Gold, and I’m a sick of this typecasting. Granted, because everyone loves Ari, that’s almost all that Piven is being offered, but after sticking with him for so long when he was just “that one guy,” I demand something unique, because I know he’s better than this.

Ultimately the film really doesn’t know how to handle what it has. A few key characters are killed very early on, and I assume some of it was for shock value. Unfortunately, these characters were probably the most charismatic in the entire film, and the most repellent characters of the movie knocked them off. Who thought this was a good idea? The few people that I could actually stand in this film, the ones whose scenes are way too few and far in between, get taken out to make room for some of the most unappealing and unlikable characters I’ve seen in a while. This is just one example of how a film can take elements with winning potential and totally botch them.

At first, I didn’t quite know what to make of the violence in Smokin’ Aces. It’s quite explicit, and seemingly with no purpose. “But you liked Kill Bill,” I told myself. Yes, but Kill Bill was cartoon violence taking place in the contexts of a heightened reality, and in no way is it meant to be taken seriously; it’s an exercise in style and genre. But I figured that perhaps Smokin’ Aces was also, just from a different genre—one I didn’t understand. Satisfied, I sat back to pay attention to the film.

Unfortunately, I realized that my logic was off. There’s a point later in the film that, after much bloodshed, it seems a character is going to take the high route and let someone live. The scene ends with the character changing his mind and shooting the other person as they walk away. It was intended to make the audience laugh, and the audience I saw it with actually did. The very next scene, a key character is angry and distraught over the death of someone close to him as we see slow motion monochromatic flashbacks of the friend’s bloody death. This did it for me. Smokin’ Aces is attempting to use graphic violence in one scene to get laughs, but then turns around and uses graphic violence in a rather manipulative manner in order to gain sympathy. Am I the only one who objects to this type of treatment? It’s offensive to me because for over an hour, the film has tried to define its violence as being a source of comedy (a hard sell), but all of a sudden it wants to turn around in a pinch and say, “Hey, look at this horrible thing that happened to this guy. Feel bad for him”? No. No. It’s tasteless, manipulative, and poor storytelling. Once you have shown me that you have no regard for death in the context of the film, that’s it; you cannot change your mind out of convenience.

Going back to Kill Bill (because no film is made in a vacuum), Tarantino showed us a world of ultra-violence that’s so absurd that we automatically know that we’re not supposed to take the graphic nature seriously. I’m not here to say that none of the characters in those films garnered sympathy; I was moved by a couple of deaths in Vol. 2 in particular. But the sympathy is never forced, but rather it comes from the characters and how they’re played. Did I feel bad when Bud was violently killed because of slow-motion flashbacks? Or was it because the film was smart enough to build a character that had depth, a character that I could feel for, and then trusted that I would react when he died? Almost any film that relies on these types of “flashbacks” insults my intelligence, but to do it with something as sensitive as violence is something I can’t stand.

While Scorsese’s The Departed didn’t quite handle its violence the best of ways (it showed brutal violence to prove a point, but didn’t take into account its audience’s reaction to that type of violence: laughter), its way was the direction that Smokin’ Aces should have taken. Or it should have gone the ultra-grindhouse way—no flip-flopping in between. The Departed took its violence and said, “Look how realistic this is.” Kill Bill said, “Look how cool this is.” Smokin’ Aces said, “Look how realistic and cool this is!” and I think that’s where the problem lies.

I’ve focused so much on the violence because that’s all this film is. The plot is thin and uninteresting, as are the characters (the one shining light in the entire film is Matthew Fox [of Lost fame] as the dweebie security guy. With bad hair, huge glasses, and one of the best gum-chews I’ve ever seen, he brings real life to the movie without ever needing to blow someone’s head off). The cinematographer obvious went to the Tony Scott School of Lighting (where are all these colored lights coming from? What buildings do these characters go into? Is this supposed to make it look “hip” and “gritty”?), and everything else is just fluff. It’s a miracle this thing lasted an hour-forty.