Show up to Smokin’ Aces 20 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early and you’ll discover a perfectly inoffensive way to spend an evening. Everything that’s necessary to make a sufficiently mediocre crime movie is here: “clever” dialog delivered effortlessly by an ensemble cast of ultra-cool mutton-chopped actors, heart-of-gold-but-dumb-as-bricks detectives, and lots and lots of guns.
But sadly, the other requirement is a needlessly complicated plot, and this is where Smokin’ Aces really goes balls-out.
The first half hour is an incomprehensible mess of gum-smacking bad boys slowly, slowly sloooowly revealing what I can tell you in three seconds: there’s this guy from Vegas that the mob wants killed for a million bucks. A million bucks is a shitload of cash, so every hired gun in the universe converges on the fancy little hotel in Lake Tahoe where Vegas McAsshole is hiding with his mass quantities of cocaine.
There are many other details, but ultimately they don’t matter. Smokin’ Aces fails in the same way many of its genre have failed before it-by burying itself under a mountain of exposition. Enough is never enough. There’s so much yammering and so much plot to wade through that it’s hardly worth the trouble.
But wait, the gang’s all here and it could get interesting. There’s the torture expert, the Norwegian quiet type who’s also a master of disguise, the gang of crazy Nazis, the amateurs (this time a lesbian duo), and several other hit men, all unsavory but always ultra-cool. They all stand around chillin’ for a while, mistaking one another for civilians and stabbing each other to build up tension.
It’s sort of like watching an old Looney Tunes cartoon-some of these supposedly world-class hit men are actually wearing fake mustaches, bad toupees and pilfered security jackets. And the cops charged with protecting Mr. Vegaston have no idea where the shit’s about to hit.
Then the magic begins. During a delightful little bloodbath of exploding firearms and shrieking hookers, a murderous Nazi accidentally lodges a chainsaw in his own asshole.
Seems like enough to fill 90 minutes to me. But the gunfire and bloodshed are just a blink before the tedious plot starts up again. It involves something about an old man, the FBI, some guy who’s had too much plastic surgery and other items without consequence that all lead up to an equally useless “twist” ending. I won’t give it away, but I will tell you that it involves a detective weeping meaningfully into the camera.
Here lies another major problem. It’s quite clear that the filmmakers wanted Aces to be emotionally poignant. But having an emotional connection with a film relies largely on whether or not you care about the characters-and you won’t. They all talk too fast and too much, and they’re all way too cool (or kooky) to be anything but that same hit man/assassin/drug dealer you’ve seen in a million other movies.
It’s incredibly difficult to have developed characters, emotional weight, snappy dialog, huge gunfights and long action sequences in the same 90-minute movie. Yes, it’s been done, but unless you’re a genius it’s damn near impossible to pull off. Hollywood needs to pick one or the other, because in a film like Aces, having your detectives and pink-eyed cokeheads wail at the heavens and weep to sad music is just fucking silly.
Skip Smokin’ Aces and go rent something instead. You may not find any Nazis with chainsaws in their asses, but there’s bound to be something out there that’s simpler, bloodier … better.