SMOKIN' ACES

Directed By Joe Carnahan
Written By Joe Carnahan
Starring: Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Joel Edgerton, Peter Berg & Martin Henderson

Despite boasting a talented cast, some high octane set pieces and David Fincher-esque stylistics, Joe Carnahan’s follow-up to his excellent cop drama Narc navigates post-Tarantino terrain and loses its direction, emerging a hollow vessel in desperate need of some serious gravitas.

The film opens as Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel, (Piven) a top Vegas magician and entertainer, turns federal witness on some very powerful crime families. Consequently they want him dead. A million dollar bounty is offered and a multitude of idiosyncratic sass-talking killers & bounty hunter’s descend on Buddy’s hotel penthouse. At the same time, their paranoid target back and forth’s with the FBI, (Garcia, Reynolds, Liotta) attempting to negotiate a witness protection deal whilst partying with whores and hoovering his way through mountains of cocaine.
The films first half establishes a stylish crime noir tone verging on screwball farce, which it manages to maintain while introducing a litany of underworld freaks and misfits; however it makes a fatal misstep when it changes gears from a fast and furious lead-fest to sub-Usual Suspects dramatics, causing the needlessly complicated plot to creak under the weight of its own under-developed characters and unjustified drama. The final scenes do rate a mention, if only for the truly spectacular bloodshed and gun play which is about one bear-trap short of a Sam Peckinpah wet-dream. Carnahan’s fan-boy roots in ‘70’s cinema are entirely evident and his virtuoso directing skills are without question but this unfocussed (and at times, pointless) chaos makes Guy Ritchie’s slickly crafted crime fests seem like Kurosawa by comparison.