Review of Smokin' Aces (2006) by Joe L — 03 Dec 2010

It says a lot about a film when the only positive review that they could put on the DVD box is from Nuts Magazine. Despite a cast of famous faces including Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys and Ryan Reynolds, Smokin' Aces is very much a disappointing film. Director and script writer Joe Carnahan tries to turn this into a film reminiscent of one by Quentin Tarantino. However he only focuses upon one aspect of Tarantino's film making, the Gory violence. Despite the best efforts of Carnahan, the dialogue has none of Tarantino's film, and is more uninteresting than gripping, whilst there is little in the way of wit at all.

Jeremy Piven stars as Buddy 'Aces' Israel, a Las Vegas entertainer, who has turned snitch for the FBI on the mafia. The mafia therefore places a bounty of $1million on Israel's head. Soon after hit men, assassins and thugs all turn up at the hotel where Israel is being held in protective custody to try and kill him, and claim the bounty.

The Smokin' Aces script is predictable, and just generally not that good. Carnahan tries to make his violent script seem intelligent by adding in two plot twists into the story. Unfortunately one of these is so easy to predict, I think I worked it out within the first half-hour of the film, which suggests to me that anyone with a brain will find Smokin' Aces infantile and obvious. However, I will admit that I failed to guess the second plot twist, and that during the film, there are some events that leave you sitting there thinking 'wow, I didn't expect that!'.

The cast of famous faces also promised more than it gave in Smokin' Aces. With actors such as Ben Affleck and Andy Garcia starring in this film, I expected more in the way of acting ability. However, dialogue is delivered flatly, meaning that scenes that are supposed to mirror famous Tarantino dialogue scenes are just boring and I found that I didn't especially like any of the characters at all, meaning that I didn't really care what happened to them by the end of the film. Alicia Keys is disappointing in her first feature film role, mainly for the reasons I've expressed previously, I didn't like her character at all and her effective abandonment of her friend for Israel's second-in-command, Ivy, towards the end of the film. Despite most of the acting performances in Smokin' Aces being bad, I did enjoy Jason Bateman's small role as Israel's attorney, unfortunately Bateman is only used for two scenes, and therefore can only add very little to the film.

Despite my criticism of Smokin' Aces, I will say that it was still fun to watch the story unfold, it's a good film to watch for scenes of excessive violence and to waste a couple of hours of your time. However, this fails to be the stand-out film that it tried to be due to bad acting, and a predictable script that focuses too much on violence, rather than better dialogue that would have much improved the quality of the entire film.