SMOKIN' ACES: REVIEW

“Make it make sense!” pleads Ryan Reynolds to Andy Garcia.

Wrong line, wrong movie, wrong person to ask, Mr. Reynolds: Andy Garcia has been in more turkeys than are worth mentioning, and he doesn’t have any answers for you as to what the hell is going on and why you signed up to do it.

Ryan Reynolds is arguably the lead of Smoking Aces, which is writer/director Joe Caranahan’s craptatstic follow-up to his solid Narc. Reynolds and Ray Liotta (also in Narc, and much better) play FBI agents who learn of a plot to assassinate Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven) a drugged-out mob snitch.

Isreal has a floor to himself at a Lake Tahoe Casino, where he spends his days doing cocaine, grimacing at hookers and berating his underlings. He’s about to sign a deal with Andy Garcia (played with dead-on accuracy by Andy Garcia) to give up la cosa nostra, and so the mob decides to sign a deal with anyone with a gun to kill him: $1,000,000 to the man, woman, Ben Affleck or neo nazi who can successfully retrieve the heart of Mr. Israel. I can only imagine what Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert could do with a premise entitled “Bring Me The Still Beating Heart of Entourage’s Jeremy Piven,” and believe me, I’d rather write about it and you’d rather read about it, but on we go.

So the premise is basically, ‘shoot-out at the casino.’ Throwing reality and logic out the window for the moment, this isn’t a necessarily terrible idea. Every quirky version of hit man and violent maniac you can think of leaps at the bait, resulting in carnage and ironic bullets flying every which way. Like Lock Stock or Casino Royale or Ocean’s 11, this movie looks like it’s cobbled out of old parts with new polish, which can be worth watching.

But after the first 20 minutes of set up and one-liners, a deep dread begin to set in, as one realizes that for any action movie to work, you have to at least care what happens to the cardboard cut-outs. Die Hard became a trilogy not because of the big bangs, but because of John McClane. This, on the other hand, isn’t Die Hard. Or Die Hard With a Vengeance. Hell, it isn’t even Die Hard 2: Die Harder

I often thought of 3,000 Miles To Graceland during this long two hours, in the same way that a shark-attack victim would think of Jaws. No, that’s not fair: 3,000 Miles To Graceland had Kevin Costner trying to be cool, which is something I would not wish on my worst enemy.

But Smoking Aces is a carrier of many of the same genetic diseases that plagued Graceland: no control over tone, no sense of coherency in plot-building or action choreography, and no characters worth giving a damn about. They’re all potentially interesting yet disappointingly thin sketches: the quasi-lesbian female assassin team, the three random Boston tough guys (lead by Ben Affleck, natch), two different ‘man-of-a-thousand-faces’ murderers, and the random neo-nazi punk guys. I say random because their accents seem to change at the drop of a hat, two of them keep trying to hump one another and they barely have any dialogue. They do sure like killing though, hyuck.

One by one (or in some cases, all at once) these bad-anime esque caricatures off one another, while Israel does more drugs and the FBI guys run around shouting at people. Oh, and for little to no reason, Matthew Fox (LOST) plays a nerdy security guard who is not long for this world, and a kid who has ADD tries to karate chop one of the hit men in the balls. I mention the kid because, he easily took up about 5 minutes of the movie (complete with three slow-mo shots,) and then we never seem him again. It’s less that we want a pay off and more, what the hell was that about.

What the hell is any of this movie about? If it’s a shooting gallery, why do the action scenes come in such abbreviated clips that it’s impossible to enjoy them, much less follow them? If it’s tongue in cheek, why the almost-serious scenes between characters that are-they MUST be- written by by computer, featuring “You sold us out!” and “This wasn’t part of the deal!” Why the scenes between Piven and his (ha!) entourage where it almost seems like someone is acting, only to be interrupted by jizz jokes? Why do characters sometimes die after one bullet wound, but others take about 15 to die? And if all the bodies and the carnage were leading up to the howlingly awful twist ending, don’t you think that’s what the movie should have, I don’t know, been more about? Why? I’ll tell you why. Because Joe Carnahan is a god-damn genius, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

Smoking Aces is a direct-to-video, masturbatory Snatch rip-off peppered with Usual-Suspect twist pills, so that you feel less jerked around by the time that it’s over. The effect is putting an anti-bacterial bandaid on a gushing blood wound: it ain’t going to help. This movie (spoiler alert, if you actually like pain and plan on seeing this movie) kills Ben Affleck in the first 20 minutes, and it still isn’t enough to make it worth watching.

Actually, truth in reporting: worth watching is one character: the lawyer with no pants, played by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development). I’m not sure what he was doing in the movie, I’m not sure why he had no pants on or why he had half of a bunny suit in his hotel room, but he at least was a loser in an original, painfully hilarious way. “Could you do me a favor?” he asks, “when you find Isreal… could you rape him? Just, just, rape him. God, I hope he resists when you catch him. I hope he bruises easily.” I’m not saying his character was tasteful or even likeable, but at least he was different, at least he brings more to the table than a desire to look cool while holding a gun.

I will say this for Smoking Aces: for all of it’s wretched excess and dumb-dumb writing, I was not bored. I was appalled, I was insulted, I was incredulous, but I was also glued to my seat as a slack-jawed, bug-eyed spectator of liquid horror. This is the sort of movie where, after shooting Ben Affleck in the face and playing his jaw like a puppet, a man later sits on his own chainsaw in the middle of a gun battle. You cannot help but wonder what lows that kind of movie will sink to next.

RATING: * Star (out of 5)