I wanted to see this because it contains one of my all-time favorit action film conceits: a bunch of different hitmen trying to kill the same guy at the same time. Much like one of my other all-time favorite films conceits: the zombie apocalypse, it hasn't really been nailed to my satisfaction in any movie yet. Smokin' Aces comes as close as any movie yet has to scratching my "hitman orgy" itch. It's got a relatively interesting and disparate group of killers, it does a pretty good job of ratcheting up the tension as more and more killers converge on the Lake Tahoe penthouse of mob magician Jeremy Piven, and there's some sick-ass gun play, including a sequence with a Barret .50 caliber sniper rifle that convinced me that every single film ever made could be improved by the addition of a Barret .50 caliber sniper rifle blowing people away. What's wrong with the movie isn't that its a mindless gun-fest, it's that the movie tries too hard to be more than a mindless gun-fest. Writer-director Joe Carnahan, who was hailed as a neo-noir auteur of note after his debut film Narc, seems to think that he has to justify the blood and spent shell casings with pathos and plot twists. Movies like this are why we need to resurrect the Grindhouse spirit: since there are technically no more "B" movies that make it to theaters anymore, everybody feels the need to make sure their films reach a minimum standard of "film quality." Too bad the "quality" elements are inevitably clunky and lame and just end up highlighting the movies' general lack of quality. If you cut out that shit and focus on making the gunfights as ludicriously over-the-top as possible (how about the hitmen all start shootiing at each other in the middle of a convention center full of Shriners?--it is Tahoe, after all--), you'll have a movie that is truly memorable and truly kickass instead of a monument to partially-realized awesomeness.
Score: 7.0
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