Smokin' Ouch!

While I had seen a view ads for the recently released Smokin’ Aces and had chalked this up to one of those films that I will put in my Netflix Q only to be continuously pushed down my list as other more worthy films come out (the film Domino fits this bill as well), this review in the WSJ struck me as one of the most sedately savage reviews I’ve read recently

When someone says, in "Smokin' Aces," that a Las Vegas mob boss wants a snitch's heart, it is not a figure of speech. That heart, beating in the chest of a sleazy magician named Buddy "Aces" Israel, figures heavily in an otherwise heartless and ultimately brainless action thriller. But calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free, and acknowledge the wisdom of Mr. Carnahan's self-promoting, semiliterate Web site, in which he says: "Don't let those douchebag critics scare you off. I promise, on the souls of my ancestors, you will come out of that movie with at least one scene, that you'll never forget."

Possibly more than one. The splatter of mutual snuffery in an elevator. The grisly ventriloquism of a killer manipulating his dead victim's face. A monstrous child gone off his Ritalin. The souls of the filmmaker's ancestors may be safer than our own, for "Smokin' Aces" is a vision, nightmarish but far from unthinkable, of a movie genre in which drama and character -- fuhgetabout character development -- have been banished by extravagant freakery, cheerful degeneracy, mind-numbing logorrhea, lip-jerk profanity and serial spasms of murderous violence, all framed in the sort of striking, hollow images pioneered by fashion photography and music videos.

Mr. Carnahan came to prominence four years ago with a darkly efficient little cop thriller called "Narc." To give him his due on "Smokin' Aces" (the first word of the title is a gerund), he applies lavish amounts of manic energy and perverse humor to an outwardly simple premise -- all sorts of unpleasant people want to kill Buddy Israel before the FBI whisks him away to protective custody. The plot comes equipped with some intricate twists, but they aren't really dramatized. Rather, they're discussed and simultaneously illustrated, in fragmentary music-video style -- first to let us know what we're going to see, and, at the finish, to explain what we've seen.