Smokin’ Aces
R
2007
*** out of ****

I had a four day weekend last week. Guess what I did? I went to the theater three times. ^_^ This movie was probably my second favorite out of the three that I saw. It’s fun, violent, and has a fantastic ending.

Premise: Las Vegas. FBI. The Mafia. Loads of hitmen. All the elements of a great film. Or at least an extremely entertaining one! A mob boss takes out a contract on a Las Vegas performer/gangster (Buddy Isreal) who is ready to turn state’s evidence against him. Since the contract is $1 million, quite a few hitmen want to be the one to kill him and have a nice big payday. The FBI wants to keep Isreal alive. Quite the task when you’re faced with a whole pack of professional killers.

The resort Isreal is staying at becomes the scene of World War III when bullets start flying as the assassins try to beat each other out to get to Israel first, and things only get worse when the FBI shows up.

One of the things that absolutely makes this movie is the cast. Ray Liotta, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Keys, Martin Henderson (who is still gorgeous, even with a beard!), etc. And the diversity of the characters- from the cool, collected professional, to the crazy, psychotic Germans, from the bail bondsmen to the team of two feminist black women, from the friendly FBI agent to the spastic alcoholic attorney, they’re all entertaining.

All in all, this was actually a technically very decent movie. The writing was good, story was good, and acting was definitely above average. This was basically a good movie in a way that not many movies who spent 90% of the time being a bloody mess can pull off.

This movie didn’t really have many flaws. Obviously if you don’t like bloody action movies you’re not going to like this one, but if this is your cup of tea then you certainly won’t be disappointed. And the twist at the end is nicely surprising, but almost seems a little silly to me. Regardless, the very VERY end is wonderful. And for the record the last scene with Martin Henderson and the last German assassin is probably one of my favorites. ^_^

One more thing I’ll say - I was actually very impressed with Ryan Reynolds. Usually he annoys me (good LORD can we say Van Wilder and Blade Trinity??) but he was quite decent in this movie. So we’ll just give him a ‘you did a good job’ pat on the back. Keep it up.