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News > Why Smokin' Aces is the Most Frustrating Film in Cinema History

Written by Anthony Burch 

 

Smokin’ Aces is one of the most amazing films I have ever seen. Not because it is good. It isn’t. Not even because it’s really bad, because it isn’t that, either. No, Smokin’ Aces is amazing because it somehow defies the laws of filmmaking in that it manages to take dozens of different ideas and halfway-implement every single one of them. No single concept of the film is fully fleshed out. Everything is a disappointment. And yet, the film is bizarrely watchable. With Smokin’ Aces, director Joe Carnahan managed to craft a film that is constantly, achingly close to greatness, without ever truly getting there. The tired cliché, “so close, but yet so far” has never been put to better use than when describing this film.

Aces is an outright phenomenon. It is absolutely “okay” in every measurable way, from the setpieces to the characters to the plot, and yet the film is more than just okay. It is not bad, it is not good, and in this respect, it is absolutely frustrating. If it were great, we could all love it. If it were a piece of shit, it’d be easy to dismiss and it wouldn’t personally haunt me like it does. If it were okay, I could just forget about it. But no. Smokin’ Aces frequently and repeatedly goes from awful, to okay, to fantastic, and back to awful again throughout the entirety of its 100 minute running time – it’s consistently inconsistent.

Because of this, it drives me fucking nuts. And here, for your reading pleasure, is why it should drive you nuts as well. Spoilers ahead.

All images used are the property of Universal Pictures.

Characters: too much and not enough at the same time

 

No aspect of the film represents this “almost great” quality of Aces better than the cast of characters: for every cool character that we want to see more of, we’re forced to deal with just as many irritating personalities.

The characters in Aces fall into one of three categories: good, decent, and WTF.

The good characters are exactly that: interesting, entertaining characters who you want to see more of. Characters like Buddy Israel (Jeremy Piven), or Rip Reed (Jason Bateman). As it stands, these characters are the ones we get to see the absolute least: Rip Reed has exactly one and a half scenes, and Buddy Israel, despite being the focus of the entire film, only has about four. Enjoy what you can with these characters, because that’s all you get. Carnahan had the good sense to make the characters interesting and attractive, but not the decency to give them any more than ten minutes of screen time each.

The decent characters are the most numerous in the film: whether we’re talking about FBI agents Messner and Carruthers (Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta), lesbian hitwomen Georgia Sykes and Sharice Watters (Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson), or outlandish hitmen like Pasquale Acosta or Lazlo Soot (Nestor Carbonell and Tommy Flanagan), these characters are almost good, but not quite. They each have their assets that make them somewhat watchable – Nestor Carbonell is the nicest murderer on the planet, Liotta and Reynolds share some fun adlibbed dialogue at the beginning of the film, and Alicia Keys suddenly decided to get really hot – but they only really function as human props, used to drive the action.

 

Then there are the WTF characters: those personalities who are so outlandish, so ridiculous, that they seem to have been ripped from an entirely different film. The Tremor Brothers (Chris Pine, Kevin Durand, and Maury Sterling) and Warren (Zach Cumer), the Ritalin-chomping kung fu preteen, belong firmly in WTF territory. While these characters may be funny and entertaining in different contexts, they remain totally out of place when combined with the other characters. When the camera does a closeup of Warren the Monkey Boy’s erection as he practices with his nunchucks, it’s difficult not to wonder if some lazy projector boy didn’t accidentally splice in footage from a completely different film.

When Smokin’ Aces was released, I remember many critics complained that we spent either too much or not enough time on the many characters: several critics argued that the cast should have been reduced by half. I don’t hold to this, personally. One of the main charms of the film is its attempt to pit more than a dozen different characters against one another in pursuit of the same goal. But that being said, the critics aren’t wrong – in fact, they are all right. We simultaneously spend too much and not enough time with the characters, which I would have thought was a physical impossibility. Dozens upon dozens of small characters are developed, from Sir Ivy (Common), Israel’s loyal bodyguard, to Morris Mecklen, (Curtis Armstrong), his lawyer, but they simultaneously feel underdeveloped and overexposed. It’s a bizarre, indefinable flaw that I have literally never seen in a film other than Smokin’ Aces.

It can’t decide what the fuck its tone is supposed to be

 

And in the same way that the characters remain absurdly varied, Aces also seems to have serious trouble deciding what its tone is. In one scene, the audience is meant to sadly sympathize with Buddy Israel as he is forced to choose between his safety and his friends. In another, the audience is meant to laugh when Sharice Watters angrily spouts a monologue calling for all of womankind to engage in a simultaneous, unified denial of pussy. The audience is asked to feel at least a dozen different emotions through the course of the film – but that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. Some of the best films in the world benefit from weird, seemingly contradictory combinations of humor and darkness (Tarantino made a career out of it, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil may be one of the best films ever made if only because it tackles no less than six different genres at once).

But Smokin’ Aces just doesn’t do it right. It tries, and it almost gets there, but not quite.

Take the scene where Jack Dupree and his bounty hunter friends get gunned down by the Tremor brothers. The scene is shocking, in and of itself –  the audience has been led to believe that Jack, Hollis Elmore, and “Pistol” Pete Deeks will be major players in the story, only to helplessly watch as they are randomly executed by a passing car. The scene feels sad, and stunning, and uncomfortable: the film tells the viewer that nothing is sacred, and that the viewer should be ready for that.

Then the Tremors get out of their car and ruin the entire damn scene.

While two of the brothers have an impromptu wrestling match on the hood of their car (after one strips off his clothes and draws a Hitler mustache on himself, of course), the main Tremor walks over to Dupree’s bullet-ridden corpse. He puts his hand on Dupree’s mouth and, speaking for the newly-deceased Dupree, begins to make the dead body talk.

 

Now, this should be flat-out hilarious. It should be black humor at its best, but something doesn’t gel: I’ve seen this film with at least three different audiences, and not once has this scene provoked more than a couple of nervous chuckles. Why doesn’t it work?

It may be due to the fact that the shocking, abruptly depressing emotion of seeing Dupree get killed is too strong to be wiped aside by a cheap physical gag: that the sheer surprise of watching one of the supposed “good guys” get randomly killed is too emotionally affecting to make the subsequent corpse jokes very funny.

Or, more likely, it’s the fact that the corpse joke is self-defeating in the scheme of the film. Humor, even black humor, sometimes serves as a method of endearing a character to the audience. Humor is why we forgive Greg House for being such a jackass. In an interview, director Joe Carnahan stated that the film wasn’t so much about flash and spectacle as it was about sympathizing for all of the main characters, the Tremor Brothers included. This brief, ostensibly humorous scene was meant to endear them to us, somehow. But the lead Tremor’s decision to mock the dead body of the audience’s assumed hero feels like an Arab joke after 9/11: too soon, too soon. The audience is meant to, if not care about Jack Dupree and his friends, at least like them, and root for them in some way. If our sympathy is firmly with Dupree, then we are immediately angry at whoever killed him: at this point, any and all subsequent joking by the party in question seems less like dark humor and more like cruel, derisive mockery. That’s our friend, man: if you’re going to kill and make fun of him, don’t expect us to laugh.

So, what’s the tone? Is it darkly comic, where we can laugh at the deaths of all the characters, or, as the director says, is it a serious film where we’re meant to empathize with every character? You simply can’t have both. Before the Tremors get out of their car, the scene is fantastic. But when Ben Affleck’s corpse begins to talk, the movie basically shoots itself in the foot.

Acosta vs Matthew Fox

 

Other than the Affleck’s Talking Corpse scene, the most tonally confused part in all of Smokin’ Aces also elicits the most unintentional laughs out of any scene in the film. When Pasquale Acosta stabs Matthew Fox’s character (I don’t give a shit what the character’s name is, because it’s just Matthew Fox playing Matthew Fox, except in a funny wig), he grabs him and tries to ease him through his impending death. Hypothetically, this scene could have been disturbing, yet sweet – in the same way that The Operative in Serenity consoles his dying victims with words of encouragement, so too does Pasquale Acosta try to make Matthew Fox’s death (relatively) painless.

But instead of channeling Chiwetel Ejiofor’s quiet, homicidal dignity, Carnahan forces actor Nestor Carbonell to get really homoerotic with Matthew Fox as he dies.

And I mean, really. Multiply Top Gun times two, and you’re getting close to how homoerotic this scene is. Acosta cradles Matthew Fox’s head close to his, whispering quietly to him, their foreheads touching. When Matthew Fox slumps to the ground, Acosta practically leaps onto his prostrate body, working his way up to his face as he delivers an unusually good line (“Don’t let my face be the last thing you see…because Heaven may hold it against you”) and appears to be roughly an inch away from French kissing Jack Shephard. This scene, like so many others, could have been so cool: certain parts (namely, Carbonell’s delivery of the “heaven” line) serve as murderously painful glimpses toward how great the scene could have been.

The plot structure

 

Many critics and moviegoers attacked Aces for its narrative structure: the entire film essentially hurtles toward the showdown at the penthouse suite, without stopping for directions or much character development. With the exception of some early and perfunctory kills (the murder of Dupree’s entourage notwithstanding), the audience is forced to wait until the penthouse showdown to get the action it craves.

I can understand why others would hate this structure, but I rather like it. As we watch our dozen characters converge on the same location, it makes the entire film one huge buildup for the orgasm at the Tahoe penthouse.

But (there is ALWAYS a “but” with Smokin’ Aces), this structure only works if the buildup leads to an appropriately climactic and action-packed final showdown. And boy oh boy, does Aces absolutely fail to do that.

Disappointing end gunfights

 

Despite the fact that Aces doesn’t know what its tone is, one thing is for certain: it’s about action, and a lot of it. All the main characters are killers of some sort, and the entire plot revolves around a dozen different characters trying to kill/protect the same guy. If there was any film that needed one huge, centralized gunfight for its finale, Smokin’ Aces is it.

But what do we get? Three separate, short, and disappointing gunfights: one between Carruthers and Acosta in a cramped elevator, one between the Tremor Brothers and the hotel security staff, and one between the lesbian hitwomen and Messner’s FBI squad. The final battles in Smokin’ Aces could have been visceral and memorable, but they all manage to fail in startlingly new and different ways.

The Tremor fight, for example, should have been a disturbing, drawn-out, gory affair. Throughout the entire film, the audience has been told about how crazy and stupid and violent these bastards are: why not let us revel in their insanity near the film’s climax? Even if we just hate them and want to see them die, it couldn’t hurt to see them in their natural element for once. The set-up to the fight feels taut and suspenseful. The security staff lines up in front of an elevator door. Smoke begins to slowly eek through the crack of the door as the sound of a chainsaw revving can be heard. Sir Ivy, handcuffed, cautiously moves behind the security team. The camera slowly and fluidly moves around the scene, informing the viewer as to the exact geography of the hallway where this fight will take place. Then, the doors open. And one by one, the Tremors run out, each brandishing a different bladed weapon.

Then we cut to something else.

What? Why?

 

We’ve been itching to see the Tremors do their thing for the entire film, why would Carnahan even consider cutting away from the action after building the scene up so heavily? Perhaps he was trying to pull a Guy Ritchie – at the end of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, two different gangs met each other in the same room and when they blew each other away off-camera, it was cool. But – as Carnahan has been quick to point out – he is not trying to be Guy Ritchie.

We cut back a few minutes later and we see the Tremors kill a couple of security guards (in a method that looks just cool enough to make you wish there was more footage of the Tremors hacking up the poor bastards), but the scene is over almost before it begins. And, to be quite frank, it’s horribly filmed: when Sir Ivy shoots one of the Tremors in the leg and he falls over, supporting himself with his hand (in the picture seen above), the framing of the next few shots makes it extremely difficult to notice that his body is only inches away from falling onto his still-active chainsaw. When Sir Ivy shoots his hand and the Tremor does fall on his chainsaw, it ends up being confusing instead of shocking and cool – the Tremor falls, and suddenly there’s blood everywhere. We don’t actually see his body make contact with the chainsaw, and the shot, as a result, looks messy and perplexing – again, having seen this film with at least three different groups of people, I can attest to the fact that almost no one had any sort of reaction to what should have been the goriest moment int he entire film.  What could have potentially been the biggest gunfight of the movie is over before it even starts.

The other large gunfight, the one between the lesbian hitwomen and Messner’s FBI agents, is clever but wholly unsatisfying. Sykes is trapped in an elevator, Watters is firing at the FBI agents from a building a block away, and Messner’s men stand around and get violently executed without being able to do much about it. The scene looks sort of neat (Watters’ sniper rifle is powerful enough to result in some agents getting thrown back REALLY far by the bullet impact), but the FBI agents’ inability to do anything other than shoot at the windows makes the affair feel dull and one-sided.

 

The one gunfight that actually does deliver, however, is the one between Pasquale Acosta and Agent Carruthers. The buildup to the violence is fantastically suspenseful: Acosta tries to BS his way out of stopping the elevator, while Carruthers slowly and gradually begins to understand that the mild-mannered hotel employee across from him is not who he says he is. When the two finally fight each other, it’s gory, flashy, and shocking – exactly what a Smokin’ Aces gunfight should be. The problem? It happens far too early in the film. The two effectively kill one another before Sykes or Messner even arrive on the scene, and the film prematurely ejaculates its best action scene before the true climax.

Even given how relatively disappointing the other two gunfights are, they could have been forgiven if they’d been edited together with a little more panache – instead of setting all three gunfights simultaneously and cross-cutting between them (like in the exciting climax of Return of the Jedi), the gunfights are spread too far apart. The audience sees an underwhelming gunfight, the film pauses, then we get another one, pause, and then we get a final one. Half of the Tremor fight happens before the Sykes/FBI fight and the concluding half appears after, but the scenes are a few minutes too far apart to be as interesting or exciting as they could have been, had they been spliced together. It’s a general rule of film criticism that you don’t have the presumption to suggest an alternate method of shooting a scene, but the gunfights in Aces almost beg for it: the fights could have been so much more operatic, or at least more tightly edited.

I am also nothing, if not presumptuous.  

WORST TWIST ENDING IN FILM HISTORY

 

The funny thing is that out of all of the numerous and awful offenses that Smokin’ Aces is guilty of, many (if not all of them) could be forgiven if only the ending were different. The problems with the anticlimactic, third act gunfights are inextricably linked to the sheer awfulness of the ending: Carnahan evidently thought that the twist ending was so important that it wasn’t worth creating a big, explosive action setpiece that would ultimately distract from it.

So instead of the explosive and bloody climax the audience is promised at the beginning of the film, we are forced to watch several lackluster gunfights slowly reach their end as the characters, one by one, leave the hotel. And then Carnahan drops not one, but two absurd and unwarranted bombs on the audience (yes, there is more than one stupid and simultaneous twist ending, thus making this the Metal Gear Solid 2 of filmmaking).

First: It turns out that when Primo Spirazza asked for Buddy Israel’s heart, he wasn’t being symbolic – the two are father and illegitimate son, and Spirazza needs the heart for a transplant.

While the audience is still groaning about this first twist that robbed them of the huge action finale they so dearly desired, Carnahan drops the second bomb:

Primo Spirazza is actually the alter ego of Freeman Heller, the undercover FBI agent who was frequently and unnecessarily mentioned several times over the course of the film. Where the audience was supposed to think that Spirazza killed Heller, it turns out that Spirazza is Heller, and the FBI had ordered his execution.

Generally speaking, there are three main reasons a twist ending can suck: if the twist is too obvious too early, if the twist comes absolutely out of nowhere, or if the audience didn’t want a twist in the first place. Most bad twists only fit one of these criteria. Smokin’ Aces somehow manages to fulfill all three. Heller is mentioned far too frequently in the first and second acts to not come back in some form near the film’s end, but his ultimate connection to Israel and the FBI is ridiculous and totally unwarranted. While the Heller-Spirazza connection was obvious after the second flashback, there is literally no foreshadowing, no clue, and no reason that Israel should turn out to be Spirazza’s son.

 

It also ends up being totally self-defeating, in the grand scheme of the film: if the audience is meant to sympathize with every character then why is Buddy Israel transformed from an interesting, surprisingly three-dimensional character into a comatose plot device, existing only to serve as the means to the film’s ridiculous ends? If there is any character in the entire film who elicits sympathy, it’s Buddy – Jeremy Piven’s portrayal of the strung-out, washed-up snitch are simultaneously hilarious and tragic once Israel is forced to give up his accomplices in exchange for FBI protection. Once the twist hits, however, all of the sympathy the audience has felt for Israel is wiped away with a single wave of the director’s hand – not because Israel loses our sympathy, but because, as a character, the twist renders him completely and utterly irrelevant. Once we find out he is the son of Spirazza/Heller, he becomes set dressing. A prop. Nothing more. Is it any surprise, then, that when Agent Messner yanks out the life support plugs for Spirazza and Israel, it’s utterly impossible to give a shit?

The final shot is awesome, taken out of context

 

And yet, as is the case with so many things in Smokin’ Aces, an absolutely awful directorial decision is followed by an fantastic(ally flawed) bit of filmmaking. While the audience could not give two shits about the fact that Messner decides to kill Spirazza and Israel, the scene where he does so is nothing short of breathtaking if viewed out of context.

The camera slowly and solemnly pulls back, framing three dead men: a father, a son, and an FBI agent without a future. Ryan Reynolds actually shows an emotion other than effortless, charming determination.

And composer Clint Mansell, for the first time in the entire film, creates a track that stands on its own for this final shot. Granted, it’s pretty repetitive (you can listen to it here – it’s called “Dead Reckoning”), but it perfectly captures the cool, stylish tragedy of the moment.

The shot is so good when viewed separately from the rest of the film that it’s actually quite easy to forget the fact that it actually serves as the culmination of dozens of different directorial mistakes, and is absolutely underwhelming considering all the crap the characters had to go through to reach this one point. But if you showed this scene on its own to a friend who was unfamiliar with the story, you might manage to convince them that it came from a really, really good action movie.

The real problem develops when they want to watch the rest of the film.

Conclusion

 

All in all, Smokin’ Aces is a film that is absolutely incredible in its inconsistency. It is a film that needs to be viewed by everyone, especially those who wish to pursue a career in film. Not as an example to be followed, of course, but as a warning: here is how awesome concepts can turn bad within the drop of a hat. Here is how to take a film that could potentially be one of the greatest crime flicks in history, and turn it into a cruel affront against the audience that refuses to ever become great, but simultaneously refuses to ever be outright bad. Smokin’ Aces defies description, and, like the film itself, that’s both a great and an awful thing.

Smokin’ Aces is where great ideas go to die.