I liked the first Smoking Aces. This one has Vinnie Jones, Tom Berenger and Michael Parks and a couple of hot chicks but this movie is just AWFUL. I would give it a zero if I could.

If you saw Smokin’ Aces, you know the drill. A hit has been put out on someone for some semi-convoluted reason, and this brings in the supposed best of the best. The redneck family’s one remaining kin is here, brining along a female cousin, daddy, and a retarded member of the clan. Soot, master of facial disguises, is also there. There are also names that people will recognize, some people won’t, and all of this to protect a seemingly broken down old FBI agent with mid-level clearance that has “popped across the wrong information. The place they put him is a veritable Fort Know, too, and doesn’t look like it could be broken into.

I guess firing midgets with TNT at it, RPGS at it, and a montage of other things just weren’t on the protection list.

Like the first movie, this continuation tries to take something slick and add it to the storyline. The only problem is that the slickness is overdone in a lot of ways, and it really doesn’t amount to that much when everything is said and done. When I saw a few of the names billed, I thought we might have a chance at some bad guys still being bad. I’ve gotten partial to a few of the killers here after some Guy Ritchie films and I thought I might get a taste of that – no such luck since they didn’t let him be him. (That was said, too, because he really does strike me as a mean sorta “chap.”)

The way people kill is a reflection of the last movie (except for the carnie way – which was pretty funny), and many of the characters are just generic spawn left over from the murderous gene pool. Even some of the ways that protection is offered seems the same – although the reasoning is a big different and the world is a conspiracy – and the wonder of the cards kept me thinking of the first showing. Everytime our witness went down the rabbit hole I thought,” is this a guy related to Buddy? Are they going to steal his heart or kidney or something else inside the amn?” It was distracting. Speaking of the killing once more, the methods used made it really hard to imagine these people killing their way out of a paper bag – much less a bad situation. I mean, I’m sure that many types of people use many types of talent to do things BUT the FBI watchers aren’t stupid. They don’t hear names in closets and think “i should stare at the wall and wait to die” and things like that. Added to that was the fact that the inbred army doesn’t seem to have much going for them, the same scams and the killers get redundant, and the whole scenario seems to be – a copy.

I really wanted to like the movie – I liked the first one enough to think that the banter was fun, that the violence was interesting, and that the story was something that really had its moment. That was what made this movie so problematic – it had holes in it, and the holes kept popping up everywhere. The reliance on the same old gags made me think of older movies where, in the past, audiences would stand and cheer because they liked the way that stuff went down. Now, however, it tastes like glass when it tries to slip into the world of watchery and torment viewers with yet another bout of lower budgeted sequels.