Smokin' Aces

I've always been a sucker for the team movie. The outfit film. In these flicks a motley - or sometimes not so motley - group gets together for some, usually nefarious, reason and hijinks ensue. Sometimes the best outfit film isn't even about the outfit or outfits. The Warriors was best when it was sketching out the various gangs that inhabit a quasi-future New York - hastily detailing hundreds of surreal street thug societies. It's those brief glimpses of odd crews that fascinate me most. Rap videos are filled with them. All those posses - who knew that every rapper's posse (and I mean every freakin' one) had to have a three hundred pound bald dude with a gold chain as thick as my forearm - with a strange multitude of members. I like the oddest ones best: the white guy with spiky hair lounging on the divan, the Heroin-chic one with a giant gold eagle on his neck, the woman with cornrows and an eyepatch, the aforementioned fat guy and the Lurch-like giant who sways slowly (like a Sequoia in the wind) in the background.



Joe Carnahan's latest (following his gangbuster Narc (2002)) is Smokin' Aces and as the preview above shows, it's a balls to the wall outfit movie. Check out all these trippy hit man, bounty hunter and mobster teams - I like the post-Apocalyptic punk outfit the best, they're like LA's Kommunity FK with body armor and automatic weapons. That or the Dreadnoks.

Kommunity FK - Something Inside Me Has Died