by Massie Twins

Created on: January 25, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Smokin' Aces is a hyper-stylized action flick with enough artillery, broads and bloodshed to satisfy any adventure fiend. However, with its curious pacing, involving sentimental, emotional, or comedic scenes which interrupt the flow of abrasive action, the film challenges audiences to acknowledge its cardinal focus. With an unusually excessive slew of characters, albeit interesting and vastly eccentric, Smokin' Aces may unintentionally lose viewers who decide that sorting out the oftentimes convoluted mayhem is entirely too much work for a simple action film.

Mob boss Primo Sparazza has taken out a one million dollar hit on drugged up and frantic Buddy "Aces" Israel, an overconfident magician who is being approached by the FBI to testify against the Vegas mob. As word hits the streets, an ensemble of degenerates and cold-blooded thugs descend upon Aces' Lake Tahoe penthouse. The FBI wants him alive and everyone else wants him dead, leading to a climactic showdown where the only thing that is certain is that no one will walk away unharmed.

For a film based most prominently in the action genre, it is bitterly intense and visually daring. Massive artillery and brutal hidden armaments make for some surprisingly nasty confrontations. The shootouts in the hotel are well-choreographed and staged and manage to show just enough bloody havoc without being over-the-top ridiculous. Uniquely scripted showdowns, including a skirmish with a chainsaw and machetes, add dark humor and witty violence to the already bloodthirsty scenarios. The many hardcore action scenes serve the film well for visceral intensity and white-knuckle suspense; it's truly a shame that a major drawback was the decision to butcher several of the scenes with unnecessary and underdeveloped segments of either humor, sentiment, or forced emotion, that utterly kill the pacing of the film.

In one moment we watch as neo-Nazi psychopath speed-freaks lunge from a smoking elevator with blazing guns, raised machetes and revved chainsaw, and just as we lean forward in our seats anticipating stomach-churning action, the film cuts to a slower, oddly placed elevator conversation, or Jeremy Piven's drug-induced dream-sleep hysteria. Even when vicious hitmen murder an unsuspecting hotel security chief in a startling split-second, the film again interrupts itself with an unexplained moment of the hitman gently talking the victim through his final moments. Perhaps in a film that allowed for more character development such

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