And it fails on all fronts
Plot
After a heist goes wrong, a thief and a troubled orphan must rescue their kidnapped partner from a ruthless drug lord and her charming assassin. This movie tries hard to be stylish and charming, just like the first Smokin’ Aces movie. Lou Diamond Phillips plays it as well as anyone can, though he’s mostly unrecognizable. The rest are so over-the-top caricatures that they’re just two-dimensional and annoying.
The action is mostly boring
The screaming and bulging eyes don’t turn it into anything funny or clever. The movie seems to think it needs an action scene every five minutes to keep you watching, and it’s partly right. The plot is so dull and all over the place that it’s hard to follow. Or rather, it’s so hard to care to follow it.
The CGI ruins the stunts to a great extent
There’s a guy who’s stolen money or something. And at least two other groups of people want it from him for reasons that are just lost on me. It’s incredibly hard to care about any of the characters when none of them are real in any way. The undoubtedly skilled stuntmen working on it lose their credibility when you realize how much of it is green screen.
Why did any of this happen?
The main character can’t even ride a motorcycle down a straight road without calling it quits. I got to the end, even though I wanted to give up several times. Since the bullet wounds mostly turned out to be insignificant, the stakes were usually nothing. When people actually died, it was hard to believe they really died, because earlier they shrugged it off even worse.
Why would anyone care?
Did anyone win in the end? I don’t know, and I watched the whole thing.