Hollywood Reporter
While the film bristles with cinematic verve, it also is as second-hand as an antique store...
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Smokin' Aces
An uber stylish gangster film which ‘Narc’ director Carnahan boldly described as the type of film Fellini would have made, had he made an action film. Very bold. A string of interlocking stories centre around a dying mob boss’ (Ruskin) one million dollar bounty put upon his former protégé Buddy ‘Aces’ Israel (Piven). Buddy, a Vegas magician turned gangster, has greed to testify against the mob. The FBI (including Reynolds & Liotta) attempt to protect their key witness as an array of aging and new hit men and women descend on Lake Tahoe, in a race to take Buddy out.
2007Rating: R18, contains violence, offensive language & drug use109 minsUK, France, USA
ActionComedyCrimeDrama
Smokin' Aces / Reviews
Sunday Star-Times
Smokin' Aces plays like the dream project of an angry, bloodthirsty Tarantino-idolising teenager aspiring to be a film-maker...
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San Francisco Chronicle
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...
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Rolling Stone
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...
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Empire Magazine
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...
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BBC
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...
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