Smokin’ Aces suffers poor circulation and pathological disunion (or an avid anti-Freudian streak)—from happenstance might claw and punch itself together yet—and out of this impairment it dredges old-school rampage and neo-hubristic insult, the kind of vain shoulder you punch gently just to cool it down. From the beginning it is caught whupping and whelping, playing too many isolateral sides to countenance—let alone mull—its penal injunctions and disjunctions; in fact, it reveals itself to be nothing more than hungover, totally beside itself, with a facile or disgusting taste in its throat. Yet it squints right through the glare of misfortune, dallying its herpetic or concentric bleach like a series of surreptitious thuds, and I get the feeling any adjunction to its dissipation would be indulgent, unnecessary prescription. Smokin’ Aces is agitated, ignoble; it brandishes the penetration of faces and names like it were mixing a bisque of cards and chips. Its statutory depiction of torture is by far the most honest disclosure of presenting conflict—i.e., other than promissory gun-show self-loathing, admixed or abetted with geometrical terror—it manages to make, but conversely, Ryan Reynolds is not, for once, metaphorical, but eponymous, and I have never seen anything like Jeremy Piven’s miraculous gurning, his tempestuous plea. I catch myself away in lamentation, rueing Things and unconscious layers, knocking myself all around its devilish series of converging cuts—its richness of infamy, its posthumous scab delusion, its call-collect ones.
Smokin’ Aces (2006)
