Smokin’ Aces (*1/4)

? Rival teams of assassins target a magician/gangster (Jeremy Piven) who’s holing up with hookers and bodyguards in a Lake Tahoe penthouse after agreeing to turn state’s evidence against his mobster cohorts. Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta are the primary FBI agents

+ The movie’s obviously set up to end with a spectacular orgy of violence, and the one thing I liked is that the inevitable shoot-out actually comes before the end, which features a revealing plot twist that some may find clever (if far-fetched), though I’d long since stopped being interested. There are a couple of good performances, including singer Alicia Keys as one of the assassins, and Curtis Armstrong as the witness’s lawyer.

- Every couple of years a movie comes along that I flat out can’t stand from the get-go, and this is one of them. It starts out with an FBI agent tossing about 50 names at you, and already I didn’t care and couldn’t remember, although that turns out not to be crucial. The main thing, though, is that nearly every moment of this movie felt forced and contrived, like a lesser version of a Quentin Tarentino movie, most notably Reservoir Dogs. Now there’s a movie with a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters who are nonetheless interesting. Here’s a bunch of loathsome and despicable characters (excepting the agents, who appear only occasionally) who are just unreal, like the lesbian assassin who’s so stealthy that she randomly lets loose a profane tirade on a hotel desk clerk. This is one of a few left-field attempts at comic relief. Two of the others involve the killers stopping to chat with the corpses of their victims. The witness (Piven) is sleazy, obnoxious, depressed, and unpleasant to be around. There’s a story to the movie, but most of it is explained in about three minutes at the beginning and end by having a character simply recite it. Lame.

= *1/4 The one thing I can say about this is that it’s not simply a Hollywood studio throwaway. That is, it has a personality, as you’d expect from something with a single credited writer-director, Joe Carnahan (Narc). I therefore expect that a fair number of people will disagree with me about the movie’s virtues. Carnahan utilizes overlapping visuals and speech and generally keeps things moving fast. He also delivers the heap of violence (with some degree of novelty) that viewers will be expecting. And that may be enough for some. But only really good writing can make a movie as stylized as this work, and I just found the characters both fake and irritating, and the plotting absolutely silly.

IMDb link