Director	Joe Carnahan
Length	109 mins
Certificate	18
Rating	Film making: 2  Personal enjoyment: 3

Sometimes a trailer describes an entire movie. Smokin’ Aces’, a new film from Joe Carnahan, does just that. The trailer says the movie is about a group of bounty hunters, ex cons and contract killers all out to kill Buddy “Aces” Israel, a mob contact who has a million dollar bounty on his head. The trailer needs to say no more. The first fifteen minutes of the movie is just back story to explain the situation and introduce the clown characters who will be doing the killing. Then the movie takes off on all levels and heads into a rampage. This movie is a tour de force of style.

But the style isn’t simple. The film is a carousel, mixing and matching many genres and tones. It goes from eulogizing on the spaghetti western to encompassing melodramatic tragedy. Every scene has a different feel by finding a different barometer of comedy or depth, but the consistency that links everything is that the filmmaking displays everything outrageously. Nothing in this movie can be taken seriously. What we can be most grateful for is that it doesn’t try too much. It has a beginning and ending that are overwrought with explanation and stretched believability, but that’s a given with this genre. Smokin’ Aces is an action movie in the mould of The Rock (1996) with the cult humor of Trainspotting (1995) and filmed with an energy that makes Fellini look tame.

But so what? I have just described a new recent genre that falls by the wayside of an easy title, but has nevertheless has become a norm. Smokin’ Aces isn’t a very good movie, but the news is that it also isn’t very bad. Director Carnahan is satisfactorily briefly trite with details he knows his audience will be bored by and keeps the focus on characters who are as entertaining and as weird as they look. None of the actors in the movie do anything that is good, but they also do not blemish their roles by trying too hard. They all have the right look. The filmmaking keeps the story spinning, but it never becomes nauseating, and it is even able to slow down once in a while. Then the story is also creative by having multiple storylines focus on promoting the one and only story: the killing of Buddy Israel. Too many movies of this genre build up a backlog of too many subplots that are pointless and never resolved. Smokin’ Aces is just focused on the craziness of one day.

All in all, the movie is entertaining trash. Not as imaginative as last year’s Domino (2006), but not as arrogant and dumb as Snatch (2001). Carnahan, in interviews, has spoken of being influenced by Fellini. He wasn’t trying to give his film a newfound respect, but was nevertheless quoting a filmmaker that many people believe the genre has little place being compared to. The question is, does the new over-embellished action film have the ability to find greater respect? Commentators were able to make Tarantino respectable by noting the strands of Godard in his work. What history does this new generation of filmmakers have?