Review by howerd

I won't say this is the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's certainly the most annoying. With smug satisfaction dripping from every frame and a wholly unjustified confidence in its own (non-existent) cleverness, this is the cinematic equivalent of that pretentious art-school dropout who holds center-stage at a late-in-the-year graduate school party and makes you want to drag him out to the driveway and pummel him with rancid cheese. With action that's noisy rather than exciting, plot "twists" any third grade viewer of "24" could see coming ten miles away – (SPOILER coming up. It's right in the next line! Don't blame me if you actually want to see this movie. Blame yourself. --) Any chance that the two characters who are mentioned as having had plastic surgery might end up being the same character?! Also with fake cynical shocks (oh, wow big movie star killed in the first act – lucky for him), and attempts at humor that make Jar-Jar Binks look like Peter Sellers (The Tremor Brothers? Holy Christ, please pour the popcorn golden flavoring in my eyes before I have to see them anymore!), this is an mind-numbing exercise in everything that sucks about current cinema masquerading as an indie flick. And to make it even more offense, after all the fake hip Tarantino wannabe posturing (and don't get me wrong, I love KILL, BILL… I even loved Neveldine and Taylor's CRANK) it actually expects us to take the characters seriously at the end and get all misty eyes about the fate of Alica Keys and about Ryan Reynolds' moral choices… and getting misty eyed about anything to do with Ryan Reynolds may be asking too much for any audience.

My favorite review of this one came from the Philadelphia Weekly; SMOKIN' ACES is "the worst film of 1998."