Smokin' Aces

 For a while there Pulp Fiction had an outsized influence on the 90s. Sometimes it was incidental - a few flowery exchanges, some mixed up chronology - but most of the time, it was pretty clear directors and writers, consciously or not, were a little too indulgent in their borrowing; Even movies that staked out a fairly distinct area from that film, like, say, Get Shorty, ended up feeling like they owed maybe a little too much to Tarantino.

 Smokin' Aces came out in 2007, nearly ten years after that trend had mostly died down, and it felt like a weird relic from that time - but here's the thing: it might be the most honest one of them all. Bizarrely, it's not particularly similar to any of Tarantino's movies; It just feels like a continuation (and escalation) of the stylistic efforts of all his imitators.

 I say it's honest, because time's given us more than enough chances to come to grips with writer/director Joe Carnahan's sensibilities, and as it turns out that this might be their purest expression: a sprawling, over-the-top action movie, an ode to operatic excess and manly, manly men and women which happens to be shot through with a rich vein of deeply batshit strangeness. More than yet another attempt to do Reservoir Dogs, it feels like a smartarse, coke-addled take on a John Woo epic.

 The plot is simple: A wannabe mobster (Jeremy Piven) has holed up at the penthouse of a hotel, surrounded by flunkies and whores. He's about to turn informer for the FBI, and his old comrades have put a million dollar bounty on his head.

 So a bunch of disparate hitpeople converge on the hotel, while a couple of FBI agents (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds) and a host of footsoldiers do their best to keep their ward from expiring. There is a ton of exposition - way more than the movie can comfortably sustain - and a pretty cheesy (and very easy to guess) mystery at its heart, but really there's not much of a plot here; Just the chaos that results as all these people bounce off each other.

 And it really is chaos, because the killer cast (rimshot!) is about as diverse as it could be. Every group of assassins seems to come from a different genre. Among other, you've got: a suave master of disguise (Tommy Flannagan), the Tremor Brothers, a bunch  of refugees from a Mad Max film (led by Chris Pine), a duo of professional contract killers (Alicia Keys and Taraji P. Henson, the most Tarantinesque of the lot) and an Elmore-Leonard-esque crew put together by a hapless bondsman who somehow got wind of the bounty.

 Death comes quickly, and is treated surprisingly seriously. In the film's best, most bizarre scene, one of the Tremor Brothers tries to get forgiveness from one of his victims by, uh, finger-puppeteering the corpse's face and acting out both parts of the conversation.

 Elsewhere one of the killers tenderly shepherds one of his victims into the next world, and another shows a surprising amount of mercy when she runs across two dying men. It's a running theme, in other words, and it anchors a film that can otherwise come across as excessively flippant.

 It's flawed as all hell - all the exposition takes a heavy toll on pacing, and as good as Carnahan's script can be in the moment-to-moment, he writes himself into a corner far too many times. Plot threads are unceremoniously dropped, characters are forgotten, and some situations get a little too ridiculous even for this film. And since it's aping some of the worst excesses of the post-Tarantino era, there are a few bits which seem to be straining to be a little too hard to be all In! Your! Face!

 But mostly, I think it works. I like the movie lot. The cinematography (by Mauro Fiore) is surprisingly good, the action, which is mostly intended to be confusing, has plenty of cool moments and concepts, and Ryan Reynolds - who can indeed act when he is asked to, instead of being his usual Canadian-whimsy-and-dad-joke-dispenser - anchors the film with a surprising amount of gravitas.

 Time's been mostly kind to this movie; It didn't review too well on release, but seems to be fairly well regarded these days, which sounds about right. It's not a classic or anything, but compared to the movies in its DNA, it might as well be. I mean, the closest thing to it is the fucking Boondock Saints, right?