Smokin' Aces

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

A cheerfully disposable gangland freak-show thrill ride that's been directed by the gifted Joe Carnahan (Narc) as if he were trying to give the audience a seizure.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Best consumed with pizza and lots of brewskis, Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces is shamelessly and unapologetically a guy movie. It's lewd, crude and loaded with shootouts and hot lesbo action.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

For rip-snorting pop entertainment, it's one discomfiting, nasty piece of work, and ain't that a kick in the head.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Even more nihilistic and confused than "Narc," and yet a lot better. It's better for some specific and interesting reasons.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

It's hard to figure where it's going, and when the movie's over, it's even harder figuring where it's been. But the careening roller-coaster ride calling itself Smokin' Aces is such a hoot to be on, who really cares?

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's kind of like a hit man's Olympics. Isn't this grown-up? In a word, no, and that's what's so much fun about it.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

There are movies that reach for the top. There are movies that go over the top. And then there is Smokin' Aces, a slick, shallow and sometimes quite enjoyable action film that is so far beyond over-the-top that it likely mistook the top for the bottom as it burst through it on its way to who knows where.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

There's no question Carnahan has an eye for composition, an ear for dialogue and a sense of pace that, if put to better use, could make an audience beg for relief. But the characters in Smokin' Aces are about as lifelike as the occupants of vehicles destroyed in a car-safety test.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Someone should check Joe Carnahan for performance enhancement drugs. Smokin' Aces, the wild ride of a movie he scripted and directed, is so pumped up, manic and mayhem-packed that it practically shoots sweat off the screen.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

While the film bristles with cinematic verve, it also is as second-hand as an antique store.

The New Yorker David Denby

In 2002, Carnahan made an intense and violent little cop film, "Narc," with Jason Patric and Ray Liotta. He seemed to have absorbed the influences of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese and come up with a style of his own. I was a fan of that movie, but Smokin’ Aces feels like Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" pushed much further along into lethal absurdity.

Variety Robert Koehler

Smokin' Aces blows some cool smoke rings until it makes the very un-cool mistake of overstaying its welcome.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Carnahan does have an oddball sense of comic timing; what his picture lacks in hilarity it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Smokin' Aces is Tarantino lite - a vague and unsuccessful attempt to bring together a bunch of offbeat, unrelated characters in a situation where a bloody resolution is inescapable.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A roller-coaster ride that goes on far too long, ends with a colossal crash, then follows that wreck with a lecture explaining the physics of the machinery. My head was spinning for multiple reasons, none of them pleasing.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Smokin' Aces isn't a story, it's a premise with a madhouse of characters flung into a collision course that ends at the same finish line.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Spends too much time straddling the line between exuberant carnage and serious plotline when it should've gleefully backflipped into the former. Grudgingly recommended, but only if you've put your cerebral cortex in neutral for the evening.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Sadly, more than an hour of this movie is given over to talking. And not the wink-wink Quentin Tarantino kind, either.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Jennie Punter

Twitchy, messy and uneven, it's an action flick that just won't shut up. The movie is somewhat saved by a smattering of wacky minor characters and humorous bits of non-essential business, but they certainly don't add up to a satisfying experience.

Premiere Ethan Alter

To be fair, Smokin' Aces isn't a complete train wreck. Carnahan stages a handful of strong action set-pieces, most notably a close-quarters elevator shoot-out involving Liotta and Flanagan, that are a blast to watch.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The plot tangles until it seems irrelevant, the jokes can't push through the somber tone, and the most interesting moment apart from the action scenes involves one character using the corpse of one of the more famous cast members for a grisly ventriloquist act.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

It's a grindhouse-inspired concoction that may not contain a shred of originality, but it is executed with unbridled bombast and glee.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

Half the time the movie wants to be balls-out weird, and it is. But the other half – the half with the good guys – is plodding procedural fare.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

In the hands of the formerly promising director Joe Carnahan, this stylish, nihilistic, hugely derivative mash-up of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie (before wife Madonna ruined his career) is fun for roughly half an hour.

Slate Dana Stevens

Smokin' Aces is awash in ammo and carnage, but it chugs to the finish line with a tank full of sludge.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Based on this outing, writer-director Joe Carnahan (Narc) can't tell a story worth a damn--especially not a complicated mishmash like this one.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The film tries to be stylish and slick, but is mostly just nasty and blood-drenched. Piven, so funny in other film roles and on TV's "Entourage," overdoes it here, and extended scenes of his debauchery grow excessive and thuddingly dull.

Miami Herald Peter Debruge

The hyper-stylized violence, for instance, isn't nearly as senseless as the narrative bits in between. And the ''twist'' employs the same sleight-of-hand as "The Usual Suspects."

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Calling Joe Carnahan's movie heartless implies that this auteur of affectless anarchy might have meant to invest it with detectable human feelings, and failed. Better to call it heart-free.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Again and again the killers linger sadistically over the dead or dying bodies of the people they've dispatched. Did Carnahan think these sickening scenes would give Smokin' Aces a moral complexity that's generally absent from this genre? I think they make the picture seem even more morally bankrupt.