Ray Pride

So, a dozen people want to kill Jeremy Piven.

That's in Joe Carnahan's "Smokin' Aces," where his character Buddy "Aces" Israel, a sleazy magician and leading luminary in Vegas' entertainment zirconium firmament who's made a compact with the feds after his long-gestating Vegas blood has gone wrong. Like baby Arizona in "Raising Arizona," Buddy's only the approximate cause of a tsunami of fracas and mayhem. As Buddy hides out in a Lake Tahoe penthouse, FBI Deputy Director Stanley Locke (Andy Garcia) sends two top agents (Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta) to insure nothing goes awry, but there are contracts and conflicts galore, including a trio of bounty hunters (Ben Affleck, Peter Berg, Martin Henderson), a pair of black female assassins (Alicia Keys, Taraji Henson), two separate pro hitmen (Nestor Carbonell, Tommy Flanagan), a drug-addled lawyer (Jason Bateman) and Buddy's bodyguards (Common, Joel Edgerton). Plus the three Tremor brothers: Darwin (Chris Pine), Jeeves (Kevin Durand) and Lestor Tremor (Maury Serling), hillbilly escapees from an unwritten Coen brothers' script. What do they all have in common? Misinformation. And that much firepower (and chainsaw action) with that little coordination leads to chaos.

The 37-year-old Carnahan, whose earlier movies include "Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane" (1998) and "Narc" (2002), had been slated to direct the third installment of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise but after months of preparation, the project fell apart. But not without a few nods to Tom Cruise's obsession with masks dropping into the volatile, hyper-charged script of "Smokin' Aces." Comparing this visceral pop whirligig to Quentin Tarantino's work would be lazy and reductive: this is a pitch-black comedy more akin to the darker impulses of the Coens. (Producer Working Title also make the Coens' movies, and "Smokin' Aces" shares their costume designer, Mary Zophres.)

Still, in the midst of the colorful carnage and assured action stylistics, one word came to my lips about halfway through this bold, unpretentious comedy, one which I did not expect to get a reaction to when I broached it to the articulate Carnahan a half an hour or so into a spirited conversation last week. The word? "Iraq."

Carnahan grins. "Why the fuck are you the only fucking guy that sat there and said that? I've said if there is anything allegorical about this entire film, it is that the fact that misinformation goes out and fucks everything up."

There's no coordination by any of the agencies or free agents. Carnahan elaborates, pointing out that Garcia's FBI man "says to `em, `That's what we do.' And at the end, when [a character] asks him, `Is this guy worth everything we just went through?' Are you fucking kidding me? This is what it comes down to. He might just be bullshit. You traded your people for a potential something and you're not even sure what it is? Abso-fucking-lutely, absolutely. You lead with your chin, [if] you come out saying, `This is a whole...' It's not... Listen. It is all of those things you mentioned. Is it a deep, allegorical thing about Iraq? No? It's not. Is it what I understand happens with misinformation, and how we can go down the rabbit hole? Absolutely, man! How can you not, how can you be even half-ass aware of what's going on in this country and not have it influence your writing? Or not influence your art in some way? Of course it does. And the idea... I've never seen a film where it's like, `oh my god, what if it's all bullshit?' Look what we're doing, we're all over Iraq looking for WMDs, where are the WMDs? `We gotta get on these guys! They're gonna fuck us up!' And now even recently, it's like, `we never said Al Qaeda had any ties to Iraq. Where did you hear that?'"

Carnahan wrote the script after the "MI:3" exodus and in the second year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq; we spoke the day after White House spokesman Tony Snow refashioned an untruth about the notorious "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier. I observe that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there were filmmakers like the Polish Andrzej Wajda who found it difficult to make a transition away from veiled commentary without repression to work against. "You watch movies he made like `Ashes and Diamonds,' and you think, `Whoa!,'" Carnahan agrees. "You see that Soviet kind of presence. It is interesting that when that stuff goes away... What's gonna happen when we don't have Iraq? I still don't think that's as many active shots [by filmmakers] on this regime as there would be if we were transplanted thirty-five years ago at the height of the Vietnam War, when we had [filmmakers] really going for it. I understand it's a completely different time in American filmmaking, but still. If this hits [someone like] you [as an allegory for Iraq], if it hits somebody somewhere who doesn't have the wherewithal, doesn't read, goes, `That's kind of like what's going on there right now,' fuck yeah! Great. That's `Mission Accomplished.'"

"Smokin' Aces" opens next Friday, January 26.

(2007-01-16)

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