BEFORE: OK, I helped my parents get take-out twice yesterday, we had omelettes for Sunday Brunch, and I ordered from their favorite Italian place, and my father drove me over to get the food during a tremendous thunderstorm - because nothing helps you feel like a teenager again more than having your father drive you places. And on the way back there were floods and fires and downed trees and power lines, because this storm was just relentless, I don't think there had been a storm like that in that area for several years. But mission accomplished, Father's Day celebrated a week late, and so it's time for me to buy my train ticket home so I can make it to work on Monday morning - er, afternoon.
I've reached the end of this little Ben Affleck mini-chain (after postponing "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot") as he carries over again from "The Company Men", soeven though you can probably guess quite easily what movie I'll be watching tomorrow, Ben Affleck is NOT in it. And I'm very close to the end of the month, too, so sequels and stats tomorrow. I've got just enough time to watch this one in the early morning hours of Monday before getting five hours of sleep and waking up to catch the 9:15 Acela train back to New York.
THE PLOT: When a Las Vegas performer-turned-snitch named Buddy Israel decides to turn state's evidence against the mob, it seems that a whole lot of people would like to make sure he's no longer breathing.
AFTER: We're back in Vegas tonight, home of recently watched movies like "The Trust" and, umm, no wait, "Father's Day" was set in Reno. Though I did re-watch "Casino" a couple weeks ago, over the course of two or three nights, I didn't mention it here because I'd seen the film before. But I did spot a number of places that we visited on our vacation last October, like Oscar's Steakhouse at the Plaza Hotel (the scene where Sam and Ginger dine out and argue over her spending habits), the parking lot at Main Street Station (where Sam's car explodes) and the Mob Museum (which used to be a federal courthouse, appearing late in the film). I kept my eyes open during "Smokin' Aces", but it seemed to be filmed partly at the Linx, which was one hotel/casino that we didn't go to. I think the action moved to Lake Tahoe at one point, so that could be one reason why I didn't recognize much.
I know this movie has something like a cult following, which is what interested me in taping it off cable in the first place. A few months ago one channel was running both this film and its sequel, thankfully on demand so I could dub them to DVD, which helps keep my DVR from filling up. But I kind of don't get the appeal here, it's just way too quirky to be taken seriously, even for an action movie. There's a bunch of assassins, I get that, and they're all after the same target, I'm still with you, but they're all just so WEIRD in different ways that it made the entire film completely beyond the pale. One assassin, for example, uses those "false faces" that we've seen in the "Mission: Impossible" films, so his way of getting close to the target would be to kill or kidnap someone close to the mark, and then make one of those gel mold type things so he could pass AS that person. We all know, though, that the technology to do this just isn't THERE, never was, and at best the guy would just end up looking like somebody wearing a terrible Halloween mask. The movie, however, then switches actors, replacing the assassin actor with the one who played the kidnapped guy, as if the mask is SO GOOD that he essentially becomes the other guy, which is just a load of B.S. Maybe this fools the rubes, but not somebody who understands movie make-up tricks.
Then there are the three Tremor Brothers, who act like inbred hicks but they also appear to be easily distracted (or dumb) or perhaps would rather just cause mayhem than focus on their targets, so if they have a chance to use a chainsaw instead of a sniper rifle, and destroy a hotel room in the process, then that's what they're going to do. Wait, I thought this was a movie about PROFESSIONAL assassins, and they don't seem to act at all professional to me. Were they just eye candy or another distraction to keep from getting to the end of the movie too soon? Discuss.
The target here is Buddy "Aces" Israel, a former Vegas magician proficient at card tricks, mostly using Aces (get it?) who wants to testify against the mob to take it down, so naturally this puts a price on his head, which every hitman in town wants to collect. That seems like a pretty good, straightforward idea, but then it gets so darn complicated, much more than it needed to. There's an older mobster who apparently went through many surgeries over the course of several decades just to change his appearance, and how he's connected to the target and WHY he wants to kill him is to be revealed later. I'd concede that this point is rather important, but the WHY of it all involves an unbelievable back-story and so much twisted logic that I could barely make sense of it all. OK, yeah maybe in retrospect it explains things just a tiny bit, but COME ON! We already had one clear motivation why the mob wanted him killed, that's really all the story needed, piling on another reason that dovetails with the first, but makes very little sense, is just gratuitous.
So I get that each assassin has a different method for getting close to the target - the "false face" assassin I mentioned earlier has his method. The female hit-men (hit-women?) take a dual approach, one dresses like a hooker to get close to the target, while the other is in the next casino over with a sniper rifle and scope. Another assassin, Pasquale Acosta, dresses like a casino employee to get past security, and then those Tremor Brothers show up and start tearing things apart in the most unsubtle fashion, and basically everything goes to hell. Then there are the FBI agents and three ex-cop bail bondsman/bounty hunters thrown into the mix, and before you know it everyone's mixing it up and shooting at each other and I couldn't tell which end was up, or who, if anybody, I should be rooting for here.
Then for some reason, in the middle of it all, the FBI suddenly withdraws their offer of witness protection - but is this something that would be likely to happen? And then the FBI Deputy Director who changes the plan doesn't inform his own agents in the field of this little fact? That seems a bit unlikely, a twist just designed to create a bit more drama - but either this guy is a valuable witness or not, and if he is, than why drop the offer, but if he isn't, why start the whole operation to rescue him and put him in witness protection in the first place?
Then there are a few hundred little threads that never really go anywhere - like why is it so important to mention that one assassin chewed off his own fingertips so he couldn't be identified by finger prints? This never becomes important, not once. So, why mention it? Anyway I remember from watching "CSI" that fingerprints aren't the only method of identifying someone, it's just the most convenient. A criminal could be ID'd by a footprint or a noseprint, even an ear print. So this fact about the assassin matters very little.
So I don't know, there are a lot of interestingly-shaped pieces here, but I'm not sure they fit together properly to form a larger coherent thing. Compared to a similarly-themed film like, say, "The Hitman's Bodyguard", which was just as violent, just as comic, but had a stronger narrative, and something closer to a point. What was up with the kid with the numchucks? The guy in the bunny costume? And who the heck was Laverne?
Sometimes modern action pictures forget that there only needs to be a very simple objective, and when things are cloudy like they were here (or in, say, "The Girl in the Spider's Web") I find myself afterwards wondering what the point of this little exercise was - or if there even was one to being with.
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "The Last Laugh"(2019)), Chris Pine (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Common (last seen in "Selma"), Jeremy Piven (last seen in "The Family Man"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Book Club"), Tommy Flanagan (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Joseph Ruskin (last seen in "Robin and the 7 Hoods"), Alicia Keys (last seen in "Clive Davis; The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Taraji P. Henson (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Nestor Carbonell (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), Kevin Durand (last seen in "The Captive"), Maury Sterling (last heard in "Batman: The Killing Joke"), Jason Bateman (last seen in "State of Play"), Vladimir Kulich, Peter Berg (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "Flyboys"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "The King"), Christopher Michael Holley (last seen in "21"), Matthew Fox (last seen in "Vantage Point"), Alex Rocco (last seen in "Stick"), Mike Falkow, Davenia McFadden, Curtis Armstrong (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), George Fisher, David Proval (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "War Dogs"), Zach Cumer, Marianne Muellerleile, Brian Bloom (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America"), with cameos from Wayne Newton, Joe Carnahan.
RATING: 5 out of 10 stuck elevators
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