Joe Carnahan
Smokin' Aces

I watched this movie for the first time a couple of years ago, persuaded by the advertisements selling you yet another Tarantino-esque find somewhere between Guy Ritchie and modern pulp.

By the end credits, I can say I had fun, I can say that those ingredients I look for in an action movie are all 'excessively' measured, that already when the bugs reveal that a bounty has been placed on an underworld informant, with the subsequent introduction of all the mercenaries (each with their own unique characteristics) on his trail, I was there enjoying the sequence of gags/finds, adrenaline-pumping if not brilliant, with just a couple of questions floating in my head... hmm let's see what happens!... what will they invent?! Here comes a film that, for once, makes its art precisely the lack of introspection and rationality, little does it matter if the characters are (deliberately) flat pawns or if it unfolds a plot bordering on deficiency or absurdity. Next to a purely visual spectacle, there is to support a screenplay always histrionic and impactful, and a very fitting soundtrack (Prodigy, Trivium, Motorhead, etc.).

It's a frantic music video, an experiment with a bomb featuring many fuses that cannot be defused. Every frame is a breath on a flame, which instead of being extinguished is fueled. The killers are mere caricatures subordinated to an ordering architecture, they don’t have time to think; a bestial instinct weighing on them explodes gradually into mannered violence, bordering on forced self-destruction. One enjoys, for once as rarely in the history of cinema, this degenerated and vicious chaos, never satisfying that untamed thirst for sadism that seems to grow and strike at the viewer's ego.

There is also room for a small cult scene, where Ben Affleck plays a dead mime... Super.

So reaching the hotel's penthouse and depriving Buddy Israel of his heart will prove an astonishing feat, and when plausibility seems to triumph, here comes the mockery waiting in ambush...     

"If shit had any value... the poor would be born without an asshole"  quote.

3.5 /5 ^TM