Smokin' Aces

While the film bristles with cinematic verve, it also is as second-hand as an antique store...

A fatuous piece of nasty nonsense...

Smokin' Aces plays like the dream project of an angry, bloodthirsty Tarantino-idolising teenager aspiring to be a film-maker...

Joe Carnahan stumbled with his first big-budget feature, "Narc," a nihilistic, incoherent thriller, but he's back with "Smokin' Aces," which is even more nihilistic and confused than "Narc," and yet a lot better. It's better for some specific and interesting reasons...

Best consumed with pizza and lots of brewskis, Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces is shamelessly and unapologetically a guy movie. It's lewd, crude and loaded with shootouts and hot lesbo action...

Full respect to Carnahan for making the tired crime genre feel fresh, but it would have been more fun without a last-minute attempt to make it mean something...

Carnahan aims for a Tarantino-style black comedy but wildly misses the mark. Instead of crafting characters to laugh with (or at, even) he indulges a sniggering schoolboy obsession with casual mutilation and silly wigs (ref. Matthew Fox). After this garish carnival of drooling lunacy, he then has the nerve to angle for pathos...