Smokin' Aces (January 24/07)

Though it boasts an exceptional cast and a refreshingly violent sensibility, Smokin' Aces never quite comes together as a cohesive whole - a vibe that stems primarily from the inclusion of characters that are almost uniformly quirky. Filmmaker Joe Carnahan offers up one egregiously eccentric figure after another and asks the viewer to care about their respective fates, though this soon proves to be as insurmountable a task as one might've expected (most of these people wouldn't seem entirely out of place in an old Looney Tunes cartoon).

The uneven tone consequently ensures that the film is generally only interesting in spurts, with certain sequences quite compelling and others inordinately dull (ie there's a whole subplot revolving around an injured gangster who winds up in a household straight out of Gummo). The admittedly simplistic plot - which follows a whole host of good guys and bad guys as they attempt to reach mob informant Buddy Israel (Jeremy Piven) - has been augmented with a seriously convoluted backstory, resulting an absurd amount of exposition at both the film's outset and conclusion (step outside for a minute during such sequences and you'll be hopelessly lost). There's little doubt that Carnahan is striving for a more complex vibe than one generally associates with the action genre, but in doing so, the filmmaker often winds up bogging the proceedings down with an overwhelming (and unwieldy) amount of information.

That being said, Carnahan has certainly infused Smokin' Aces with a number of genuinely thrilling sequences - with the prolonged attack on Buddy's swanky Lake Tahoe suite an obvious highlight. There are also a few individually effective moments sprinkled throughout the film - ie a tense encounter between a particularly nasty assassin (Nestor Carbonell) and a hapless security guard (Matthew Fox) - but for the most part, it's awfully difficult to look past the exceedingly broad nature of almost every aspect of the production.