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.

Billy Bob Thornton’s tour of irascible assholes given to brusque dismissals of younger guys and kids (see Bad Santa, Bad News Bears, School for Scoundrels) continues with New Line’s Mr. Woodcock, starring he, Seann William Scott and Susan Sarandon. The film, which opens in January, stars Scott as John Farley, a bestselling self-help book author who returns home to find his single mother (Sarandon) dating the titular gym coach who made his pudgy adolescence a living hell.

It’s funny to me off the bat because I knew a douchebag kid with the same last name in middle and high school, but Thornton needs desperately to mix in some more amoral sharks (i.e., The Ice Harvest) and roles in straight dramas to avoid becoming a one-trick pony. I think audiences are already wearying of this routine a bit, or at least just need a break from it. Tonic may arrive next year in the form of the Polish brothers’ The Astronaut Farmer; Thornton is quite enamored with it and told me it will likely wind up being “one of the top three or four films,”  on his personal list, in which he’s starred. To view the Mr. Woodcock trailer from Ifilm.com, click here.

The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s crime drama The Departed has gone live online and despite the film somewhat puzzlingly not playing at the Toronto Film Festival — the
preeminent staging ground for early fall studio Oscar hopefuls — expect
a huge promotional push from distributor Warner Bros., which I’m hearing really likes its
chances with the movie as a star-laden, overtly commercial slice of
genre pie, despite some production overruns and editing room difficulties.

Set in South Boston, the film is of course an Americanized update of the 2002 Hong Kong import Infernal Affairs,
starring Andy Lau and Tony Leung, about at-odds twentysomethings, one
of whom is an undercover cop assigned to infiltrate a criminal
syndicate, and the other of whom is a police officer who’s really a
mole for said racket. Leonardo DiCaprio is Billy Costigan, the undercover operative, and Matt Damon is Colin Sullivan, who feeds information to Jack Nicholson’s gangland honcho. Mark Wahlberg, Vera Farmiga, Martin Sheen,  Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone and Anthony Anderson also star.

The accents are all ladled on pleasantly thick, the camerawork looks smooth and in constant motion, Nicholson does his trademark raised-eyebrows-and-lowered-head thing… basically,
this is a trailer that whets existent appetites and delivers upon
expectations if not completely wows, though it does achieve a certain
swooping if mannered grandeur courtesy of its use of that Pink Floyd
tune “Comfortably Numb.” Good times. You can check it out in Quicktime by clicking here.