Saint John of Las Vegas (**1/2)

This is the second-funniest movie of the last year to be set in Vegas, though it’s a toss up whether this or The Hangover’s plot is less believable. The Hangover, you may recall, involved a foursome who wake up to find their hotel room mysteriously trashed, a tiger in the bathroom, an unclaimed baby, and a chicken. Here we have naturists with guns, a burning tow-truck driver (in a flame-retardant suit), and the most unusual lap dance I’ve seen on film. I imagined that the chicken from The Hangover, whose presence never was explained, might show up.

It’s supposed to be based on Dante’s Inferno, in presumably its least-literal film interpretation. John (Steve Buscemi) shares Dante’s last name, Alegheri, and his journey into the here-figurative Hell is guided by one Virgil (Romany Malco)—his surly coworker, not the poet. They’re insurance investigators in Albuquerque. John’s a gambling addict who moved out of Nevada so his losses would be confined to scratch-off tickets and such, but has to go back there to uncover a possibly fraudulent claim. This is a decent premise for a movie, but writer-director Hue Rhodes, in a feature debut, is more interested in having a bunch of weird stuff happen than in showing the dark side of gambling addiction or how insurance companies really do catch cheaters. (Presumably it doesn't involve sending investigators from 500 miles away, but who knows.) The sharpest moment is when John, finally headed back into a casino, gets a call from his erstwhile sweetheart (Sarah Silverman) and quickly brushes her off.

For all the (easily ignored) 14th-century literary references, the comedy plays like a small picture whose amusing moments don’t quite cohere (or seem forced), and whose plot doesn’t really work. Dream sequences seem like padding in a film that still winds up short of the 90-minute mark.

IMDB link

viewed 2/8/2010 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9–11/2010

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