When a Las Vegas performer-turned-snitch named Buddy Israel decides to turn state's evidence and testify against the mob, it seems that a whole lot of people would like to make sure he's no longer breathing.
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.
– David Edelstein,
New York Magazine/Vulture,
30 Jan 2007
rotten:
Violence is spread throughout the film, and some of it is entertaining, I have to admit. But the climax at Buddy's Tahoe penthouse is Tarantino on speed.
– Jack Mathews,
New York Daily News,
30 Jan 2007
rotten:
We just sit there numbly, awaiting the next sensation and trying, without notable success, to comprehend the preposterous backstory.
– Richard Schickel,
TIME Magazine,
31 Jan 2007
rotten:
Not a fresh idea emerges from this risible exercise in muscle-car camerawork, squib-crazy shoot-outs and self-admiring pyrotechnics.
– Melissa Anderson,
Time Out New York,
3 Feb 2007
rotten:
It wants to be a Tarantino-esque dark comedy about gun-slinging, substance-abusing lowlifes. But instead it's a convoluted, slap-happy, humorless bloodfest.