It wants to be a Tarantino-esque dark comedy about gun-slinging, substance-abusing lowlifes. But instead it's a convoluted, slap-happy, humorless bloodfest.
Smokin' Aces
Nobody gets away clean.
2006 · 1h 49m · R
Action, Comedy, Crime
Directed by
Joe Carnahan
Overview
When a Las Vegas performer-turned-snitch named Buddy Israel decides to turn state's evidence and testify against the mob, it seems that a whole lot of people would like to make sure he's no longer breathing.
Director and cast
- Joe Carnahan Director
- Ryan Reynolds as Richard Messner
- Ray Liotta as Donald Carruthers
- Joseph Ruskin as Primo Sparazza
- Alex Rocco as Serna
- Wayne Newton as Himself
- Jeremy Piven as Buddy Israel
- Ben Affleck as Jack Dupree
- Martin Henderson as Hollis Elmore
- Taraji P. Henson as Sharice Watters
- Common as Sir Ivy
Critics on Rotten Tomatoes
Top critics, in their words
Not a fresh idea emerges from this risible exercise in muscle-car camerawork, squib-crazy shoot-outs and self-admiring pyrotechnics.
We just sit there numbly, awaiting the next sensation and trying, without notable success, to comprehend the preposterous backstory.
Violence is spread throughout the film, and some of it is entertaining, I have to admit. But the climax at Buddy's Tahoe penthouse is Tarantino on speed.
Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.
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