Everyone's a critic: 'Smokin' Aces'

Two stars (out of four)

"Smokin' Aces" is something only for the hard-core action-movie watchers. It is jam packed with all our favorite actors and lots of shooting, slashing, stabbing and blood splattering. The movie would have been better without all the gore.

It's about a man who, while still wet behind the ears, joined the ranks of the mobs in Las Vegas and became an entertainer of illusion. He knew things about the mob and was telling the feds until he found out that there was a contract on him for his heart. He went into hiding at Lake Tahoe where he lived the high life with drugs and prostitutes.

When the contract went out there were about five different groups of hit men and women out there to kill him.

To make this short, all the hit men and women come to the same place at the same time and have an old fashion shootout at a Lake Tahoe hotel. There is also this mystery file of an agent that keeps popping up, and you don't get it until the very end of the movie. If it hadn't been for the gore I would have really liked this movie.

-- Verbal Walters

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One star (out of four)

If "Natural Born Killers" ranks a place in your top 10 DVD collection, this is your kind of movie.

To me, this film was way too bloody. The story was full of interesting characters, but it was clear that the violence was to be a more important part of the storytelling. Not only were you told that the characters were violent, you had to be shown in graphic detail how violent some of them were.

I usually like a movie if I like the characters, but by the end of the film I didn't care who lived or died. I just wanted to go home.

-- Josh Lamar