Hollywood seems to think every eighth-grade class needs its own Pulp Fiction, and so the graduates of 2007 get Smokin’ Aces, a grating exercise in trendy nihilism designed to appeal to the amoral adolescent in all of us. The setup is simple enough to inspire a video game – a bevy of contract killers converge on a Lake Tahoe casino, all competing to be the first to whack Mob informant Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven). Once the guns start pointing, you begin to feel like you’re watching writer-director Joe Carnahan play one of those first-person shooter games. He knocks people off with such gleeful flair they might as well be made of pixels.
