Boxes of bullets.

The Movie: Smokin' Aces, directed by Joe Carnahan
Recommendation: The Boy
Reason: "20 minutes of exposition, 80 minutes of awesome."

My brother and I share similar tastes in movies. I've been counting on him to enlighten me as to some of the genres I'm less-than-versed in, the 'boy stuff', such as it is. Not Action or anything silly like that-I know my action movies. Westerns, war movies, that kind of thing. During a discussion about Crank he mentioned Smokin' Aces and how much he'd enjoyed it. It's been a long and involved process since then to see this movie. No less than six attempts to go to it while in theaters, two scuffed up discs when rented, one attempt at working with a bootlegged copy that had such horrible picture quality and finally, this morning, success. I have finally seen Smokin' Aces.

Was it worth the effort? It's like Crank and Ocean's Eleven had a stylish, over-amped action movie kid. A plague of assassins rains down on one complete jackass, while the FBI does their level best to put up an umbrella to protect the prick long enough to get his testimony and shatter La Cosa Nostra. Yeah, it's as wacky as it sounds. And the boy was right. I even timed it. It's twenty minutes of exposition, introducing our players and setting up the action. The premise is laid out plain as day. It's a snappy, efficient way of going about it, and I actually quite liked the opening. The broad-brush hired guns are exactly that-cariactures of the invincible assassins other hapless losers have gone up against in previous movies. Some work (Alicia Keys, not bad at all), some don't (Nestor Carbonell, go back to Hawaii and take Jeremy Pivens with you).

And now...for the action sequences. I feel that this movie had a lot of room and opportunity to crank the action to eleven. I don't know if it was a stylistic or a budget choice, but for some reason the dial only made it to ten. The premise of the movie and the characters involved were ridiculous enough to warrant some serious Con Air level crazy. There could have been sharks or an assassin with trained, murderous madagascar hissing cockroaches, and I wouldn't have blinked. It was that kind of movie. As it was, there were some really great sequences, but there could have been more. The attitude of the film would have justified it.

As an action movie, this one's pretty solid. This isn't some cerebral exercise in metaphor or anything like that. It's just an fun, chainsaw-assassin gleefest that's designed to cater to the average moviegoer's lust for simple characters, lots of bullets and snappy one-liners. And that's okay.

-121/365 down, 244/365 to go