Watching the trailer for Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces, opening January 26 from Universal, the thought crossed my mind — what exactly are those aces laced with? Carnahan did beautiful things with 2002’s gritty Narc, starring Ray Liotta and Jason Patric, and then burned about a year of his professional life working up the third installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise, only to eventually have his involvement run aground on the shoals of “creative differences” after star-producer Tom Cruise watched a bunch of Alias DVDs one weekend.
Smokin’ Aces, though, looks like the living, breathing antithesis of grittiness. The Las Vegas-set story of a bunch of colorful hitmen who compete to try to knock off a Mob snitch, it’s got the big ensemble cast — Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Peter Berg, rapper Common, Andy Garcia, Alicia Keys, Jeremy Piven, Ryan Reynolds, Liotta again — that tells those old enough to remember that it desperately wants to be this generation’s True Romance. But its frantic anxiety to please (and more than that, to try to matter) seeps through, and it makes one uncomfortable, even in only three minutes. Gaudy, violently overstylized and almost incomprehensible, it looks like a fever-dream mash-up of Domino and The Big Hit, as overseen by the former personal assistants/camera operators of Demian Lichtenstein and McG. To view the trailer on Apple.com, click here.
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Emilio Estevez’s Bobby — teeming with idealism and a palpable romanticism, and necessarily bristling with the energy of a true believer — can carry a lot of weight, depending on what one wants from it.