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'Smokin' Aces' has its own subgenre: pap fiction

Sometimes pulp fiction emphasizes pulp over fiction. PHOTO COURTESY OF UIP

"FBI! FBI!" Blam blam blam blam. "[Expletive]. [Expletive]." Blam blam blam. Spurt of blood. Plot twist. "FBI! FBI!" "[Expletive]." Blam blam blam blam blam. "[Expletive]." "FBI!" "Hotel Security!" Blam. Exploding skull. Guy sits on a chain saw. Montage. [Expletive]. Plot twist. Roll credits.

Yes, I condensed a bit, and I'm sorry if I spoiled anything, but the above is a fair summary of Joe Carnahan's Smokin’ Aces, a Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others. Watching it is like being smacked in the face for a hundred minutes with a raw sirloin steak. By the end, there's blood everywhere, a bad smell lingering in the air, and vegetarianism — or starvation or blindness — starts to look like an attractive option.

Carnahan's previous film, Narc (2002), with Ray Liotta and Jason Patric as a pair of hard-bitten Detroit detectives, won some respect for its brutal, pulpy integrity. It's a mean little picture with reverberations of urban decay and masculine defeat.

Film Notes: Smokin' Aces Directed by: Joe Carnahan Starring: Ben Affleck (Jack Dupree), Andy Garcia (Stanley Locke), Alicia Keys (Georgia Sykes), Ray Liotta (Donald Carruthers), Jeremy Piven (Buddy Israel), Ryan Reynolds (Richard Messner), Peter Berg (Pistol Pete Deeks), Taraji Henson (Sharice Watters), Chris Pine (Darwin Tremor), Martin Henderson (Hollis Elmore) and Jason Bateman (Rupert Rip Reed) Running time: 107 minutes. Taiwan release: Today

Smokin’ Aces, breathless to be more — meaner, bloodier, funnier, cooler — manages to be quite a bit less. Arriving at least a decade too late to blend in with the other mid-90s Pulp Fiction wannabes, it jacks up the body count and wears its stylistic pretensions on its blood-stained sleeve.

More than anything else, the movie struggles desperately to achieve a transcendent state of hard-boiled pop-culture knowingness, to mash up a whole dictionary of poses and allusions in a gory, syncopated pastiche. Vegas mobsters! Topless hookers! Blaxploitation hit-chicks! Redneck bounty hunters! Not to mention the FBI guys and also the hyperactive pipsqueak ninja whose grandma has clearly let him watch too many movies like this one.

And that's not all. All these folks (minus the ninja and his granny) and a good many more (I forgot to mention the cretinous white supremacist punk-rock contract killers, the Latino torturer and the ruthless master of disguise) converge on a hotel in Lake Tahoe, where a coked-up sleazeball named Buddy (Aces) Israel has taken up temporary residence.

Does his surname make Smokin’ Aces a Zionist allegory about a scrappy underdog under siege from numerous enemies? Probably not, but the role does give Jeremy Piven, who plays the agent Ari Gold on Entourage, a chance to explore levels of sleaziness that make Ari look as righteous as a biblical prophet. He also throws playing cards (Buddy is a nightclub magician as well as a gangster) and weeps at the piteous waste of it all.

The FBI, represented by Ryan Reynolds and Liotta, with Andy Garcia as their buttoned-up boss, wants to bring Israel in alive so he can spill the beans on a mob boss named Sparazza. A trio of bounty hunters, led by Ben Affleck (nice mustache!), are also on the case.

Meanwhile, the million-US dollar price that Sparazza and company have apparently put on Aces' head attracts a diverse assortment of murderous freelance talent, including Alicia Keys and Taraji Henson (Hustle and Flow), who bring some serious high-tech weaponry and a Sapphic vibe sure to titillate the mouth-breathing dudes for whom this movie was devised.

The babes, in any case, are secondary to the hardware. What makes Smokin’ Aces so bad is not the extremity of the violence, but Carnahan's formal sloppiness and lack of imagination. The editing scheme, jumping from one set of characters to another, with cute juxtapositions of image or dialogue, is annoyingly literal-minded, and the climactic surprise manages to be both predictable and preposterous. The players are introduced with great fanfare, helpfully identified by on-screen nametags, but by the time they're blown away (and most of them are), you don't really care who they were.

Carnahan puts quite a few perfectly good movies through his genre meat grinder, and comes up with something like The Departed for dummies, with some slack-jawed nods to Goodfellas thrown in for good measure.

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