Smokin' Aces (film): A star-filled massive letdown

With a massive and talented cast including Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Ray Liotta, and Andy Garcia this dark comedy / action film about mob crime almost has to be good right?

That was the thought I had when I started watching it and face after face of famous people who I actually really do like especially Piven, who I think is one of the most underused terrific actors in Hollywood. However, as the movie gets moving, you get bored of it pretty quick because it is impractical, is filled with annoying and over-the-top stereotypes, and it is trying to be Tarantino but just fails at that.

The movie focuses on Buddy Israel (Piven) who is a Las Vegas magician that became friends with the mob due to his stage show and now he is a sort of wannabe gangster. He becomes a government informant and now the mob wants him dead. The entire movie is about people trying to kill him and the g-men operatives that are preventing that.

There are a ton of irritating characters but the duo of Georgia Sykes and Sharice Watters take the cake on the worst. They are a duo of expert assassin contract killers who are just completely impractical. They also have to act street-level ghetto the entire time. Add to this fact that they use these characters to interject the film with some SJW feminist preachiness and I was always going to hate them. Get your politics out of my blood-bath gangster film.

Then they go and throw in some white supremacist brothers name the "Tremors" and this is also used as a method of educating us on how being a Nazi is bad. This film was made in 2007 so i suppose Universal Pictures was getting a jump start on all media being a Social Justice experience the way it is today. urgh!

Interjecting films with "lessons for the masses" is always going to make me dislike something but that isn't my entire reason for thinking this film isn't good.

It simply doesn't have a good plot and is basically just a sequence of action scenes that are meant to be exciting and I suppose they are at times. However, various scenes are so disjointed and impossible that it kind of ruins the film. It simply doesn't work and I think the general public agreed with this notion as professional and amateur critics alike have mostly negative views of this film.

It made a respectable profit at the box-office but that has a lot to do with the fact that the somehow were able to make this star-studded mess for less than $15 million. The sequel/prequel went straight to DVD and was worse.

I had high hopes for this one based on the trailer but in the end it was one of the more disappointing films I've seen in a while.