'Smokin' Aces' has lots of style--- in fact, it reminded me of a Quenton Tarantino, Elmor Leonard kind of thing. Sort of like 'Pulp Fiction' or 'Get Shorty', in the vibe, if not the actual set-up.
The cast is first rate. And there are moments of movie-making skill. Certainly it is competent throughout, in fact it's probably 'pretty good' throughout. The thing is, does all that style add up to much? Maybe I'm too cynical, or am being too hard to please? But it seemed to me that a weakness of the movie was, in fact, its style. That is, because I kept noticing its Tarantino vibe, instead of being simply immersed in THIS movie--- maybe 'Smokin' Aces' was a bit of a trifle? A bit of a meringue, a fluffy piece of directorial muscle-flexing? I don't mean to say it is in any way bad. After all, a well done style exercise is hard to do, and it IS a statement of sorts. But by the end of the movie I was kind of not caring who lived or died.
After 27 gun battles, some more, and some less, implausible than the others, I was certainly inured to the violence. I kind of didn't care any more. And that goes for the whole movie. At the end, I went, 'Hmmm. Yawn... got to get to the car park and get my car now'. A more impacting and meaningful movie would have had me pondering SOMETHING--- either the movie itself, or life, or hoodlums, or cops, or human ambition, or whatever.
Some of the implausibilities are easily written off and forgiven as literary or artistic license. Hey, it IS just a movie, and some goofy stunts in the name of entertainment are fine. But some of them were silly to the point of being stupid, and distracting, like a kids' cartoon. For example, at one point a sniper is firing a BAR .50 cal rifle from the 15th floor of a high-rise hotel into the heroes' floor in the hotel next door. Fine. But then half a dozen FBI agents simply whip out their 9 mm pistols and blindly start blasting back, some of them shielding their eyes from flying glass, as they duck and dive to hide from the sniper's bullets. They are shooting blindly, some from over their shoulders, some from around their backs, ALL without aiming. And all of them were also shooting directly into the exposed windows of a 20-storey hotel, endangering hundreds of civilians. That just would NOT ever happen in the real world. Ever! Yet there were several such scenes in 'Smokin' Aces'.
Small complaints, to be sure. But those, and other, gross illogicalities did distract me from believing in the scenes and the movie's story. And then, toward the end, when we are told the real reason for the interest in the Aces character-- I won't reveal it here, but it was so slim and implausible that the whole movie world kind of collapsed for me, and no longer made sense. It became a silly and half-baked fantasy of a movie idea, rather than a finished and professional movie project.
So, bottom line: a well made, but ordinary, movie. Good escapism, if you can handle extreme violence, but nothing to provoke, or invoke, anything deeper or more meaningful than the 2 hours of the movie itself. I gave this a 6 out of 10, rather than an 8 or so, for being vapid.
The cast is first rate. And there are moments of movie-making skill. Certainly it is competent throughout, in fact it's probably 'pretty good' throughout. The thing is, does all that style add up to much? Maybe I'm too cynical, or am being too hard to please? But it seemed to me that a weakness of the movie was, in fact, its style. That is, because I kept noticing its Tarantino vibe, instead of being simply immersed in THIS movie--- maybe 'Smokin' Aces' was a bit of a trifle? A bit of a meringue, a fluffy piece of directorial muscle-flexing? I don't mean to say it is in any way bad. After all, a well done style exercise is hard to do, and it IS a statement of sorts. But by the end of the movie I was kind of not caring who lived or died.
After 27 gun battles, some more, and some less, implausible than the others, I was certainly inured to the violence. I kind of didn't care any more. And that goes for the whole movie. At the end, I went, 'Hmmm. Yawn... got to get to the car park and get my car now'. A more impacting and meaningful movie would have had me pondering SOMETHING--- either the movie itself, or life, or hoodlums, or cops, or human ambition, or whatever.
Some of the implausibilities are easily written off and forgiven as literary or artistic license. Hey, it IS just a movie, and some goofy stunts in the name of entertainment are fine. But some of them were silly to the point of being stupid, and distracting, like a kids' cartoon. For example, at one point a sniper is firing a BAR .50 cal rifle from the 15th floor of a high-rise hotel into the heroes' floor in the hotel next door. Fine. But then half a dozen FBI agents simply whip out their 9 mm pistols and blindly start blasting back, some of them shielding their eyes from flying glass, as they duck and dive to hide from the sniper's bullets. They are shooting blindly, some from over their shoulders, some from around their backs, ALL without aiming. And all of them were also shooting directly into the exposed windows of a 20-storey hotel, endangering hundreds of civilians. That just would NOT ever happen in the real world. Ever! Yet there were several such scenes in 'Smokin' Aces'.
Small complaints, to be sure. But those, and other, gross illogicalities did distract me from believing in the scenes and the movie's story. And then, toward the end, when we are told the real reason for the interest in the Aces character-- I won't reveal it here, but it was so slim and implausible that the whole movie world kind of collapsed for me, and no longer made sense. It became a silly and half-baked fantasy of a movie idea, rather than a finished and professional movie project.
So, bottom line: a well made, but ordinary, movie. Good escapism, if you can handle extreme violence, but nothing to provoke, or invoke, anything deeper or more meaningful than the 2 hours of the movie itself. I gave this a 6 out of 10, rather than an 8 or so, for being vapid.