Smokin’ Aces

Unquestionably, the best part of Smokin’ Aces is the closing credits. They are done up in a perfect faux-70’s psychedelic style, and more importantly, because it means that this leaden, incoherent mess is finally over.

Ostensibly, it’s the story of Buddy “Aces” Israel, and the teams of hitmen sent to exterminate him. Get it? His name is “Aces” and the movie is called Smokin’ Aces because people are out to kill him. Get it? Isn’t that clever? Don’t you get it? DANCE AT HOW MOTHERFUCKING CLEVER THAT IS!

Smokin’ Aces feels like the director is shouting at you from the screen, and expecting the audience to confuse belligerence with entertainment. There’s might be more to the story than the tragic saga of Buddy “Aces” Israel, but it’s really hard to give a shit. Call it Grand Theft Auto cinema, but it’s nothing more than Scarface induced mayhem filmed with a years worth of music video clichés. The opening credits are just a pending body count. You know three minutes in that this film isn’t going to get any better, and every actor is just walking through the motions of a character that they’ve done elsewhere.

Most notable is Jeremy Piven, who is directly channeling his sleazy agent from HBO’s Entourage. What works so well in the small screen is left high and dry on the silver screen. Much in the same way that George Lucas hammered dull and lifeless performances out of a stellar cast in his second Star Wars triolgy, Smokin Aces is a case study of how context effects everything. Piven gives almost an identical performance to his Entourage agent, but he’s so out of tune with everything surrounding him that what’s charming in one milieu is gratingly self-indulgent in another.

The complete lack of focus is wearing, and the incessant directorial gimmickry comes off as nervousness. Slow motion, fast motion, excessive profanity and pretend-profound character monologues about soiled calfskin jackets. It’s all noise. Noise without source or purpose, nor is there any appreciable center to the madness. If you’re not going to have a moral center to your story, there absolutely has to be an amoral center, some ghoulish ringleader to lead us through the funhouse. The only constant here is the director’s self-indulgence and short attention span. When the film reluctantly selects a character to survive the carnage, he must then survive the long-winded explanation of what is actually going on, which is nonsensical hash and feels like it’s been crudely stapled on from another movie entirely.

By the halfway point of the film, you can feel even the editor surrendering to the lack of reason. Scenes seem to fall into place randomly, and moderately well composed shots get lingered upon in a token offering of substance. There isn’t a consistency to the pacing anywhere to be found, because none exists. An obvious point of comparison is Ocean’s 11, both the original and the re-make. Each of those films juggled a vast number of characters with an easy choreography.

Not long after drowning any sense of rhythm and leaving it for dead, the film shifts into panic mode. The hyperactivity quotient goes through the roof with short-attention span bursts of desperation. Like the pretentious, ripped from The Wall sequence where a strung out Jeremy Piven contemplates his eyeball in a multitude of mirrors, as if he’s testing for astigmatism.

Or the scene where one character with a sleazy mustache, whom I was fairly certain had been killed off, turns up in a trailer park with three fingers missing. He’s met by a scrawny ten year old nerd with oversized glasses , an eye patch, and a karate uniform, who tries to talk like a gangster and waves a Ritalin-induced erection at the fingerless guy while his grandma tries to shoo him away.

See? It’s funny! Because he’s a nerd! And he’s got an eyepatch! And a boner! And he says “bitch” and “dawg”! And when that alone fails to amuse, or have a point, there’s suddenly a jaunty montage of the boy whipping through his karate poses in hyper-fast motion or super slow motion. The desperation behind the scenes is palpable here as the filmmakers realize their hyper-active 10 year old with an erection isn’t wacky enough, so we better pile on the trick camera moves just to make sure you get the point that it’s wacky!

The entire venture feels bloodlessly machined, as if enough pointless nihilism could be piled up until the whole venture reaches some critical mass of cool. The good news is that sometimes the audience gets it right. The disappointing box office performance should be a sign of optimism, that sometimes the masses can see right though the atonal clanging for attention and give it the cold shoulder that Smokin’ Aces feebly deserves.