Smokin' Aces

Over the weekend Paul asked me if Ben Affleck had made a good movie since Good Will Hunting. I thought about it and couldn't really think of one (not counting Chasing Amy, as I think I'm in the minority when it comes to that one). Last night I saw what may be his first, despite (or perhaps even because of) the fact that he dies a violent death reasonably early on.

I had wanted to see Smokin' Aces at the movies. The selling point for me was the inclusion of Ari Gold, I mean Jeremy Piven, and the promise of high level violence just sealed the deal. Anyway I missed it there but grabbed it at my local Video Ezy last night (shouldn't that be updated to DVD Ezy sometime soon?)

The premise is reasonably straightforward - Buddy Israel (Jeremy Piven) is a Vegas entertainer turned mob associate turned snitch who is in the witness protection program, hidden away in a penthouse in a rural Nevada casino. The mafia have put a bounty on his head, and so it's a race between a few different groups of assassins and the FBI to get to him first. As luck would have it, they all arrive at roughly the same time, so the majority of the film is the bloody stand off between all of the different groups - kind of like the last ten minutes or so of True Romance, stretched into a full movie.

Jeremy Piven was great as the increasingly paranoid Buddy, isolated from the world and waiting for the inevitable. I also liked both the guys playing the FBI agents - Ray Liotta and Jeremy Reynolds. The script was decent I suppose, but you don't watch movies like this for the acting and dialogue, it's more of a "sit back and enjoy the carnage" experience.

I've read some bad reviews about this where people compare it to the films of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, and if that's the standard you're holding a movie up to, yeah it's not going to make it. On it's own merits though I thought it was really good, I'd definitely watch it again.