SMOKIN’ ACES (2006), Not Directed By Guy Ritchie (or Quentin Tarantino)
Now that Madonna keeps Guy Ritchie's cajones in a vault at the Bank of London (although here's knockin' wood for RockNRola) and Quentin Tarantino's gasbaggery has flared-up to chronic levels (I mean, good Lord, Death Proof would have been about ten minutes long if some brave editor had dared to cut every scrap of verbal diarrhea...but fingers crossed for Inglorious Bastards), there aren't too many directors cranking out simple gun-slingin' all-star demolition derbies like Smokin' Aces anymore. The formula is relatively simple: combine a dozen or so intersecting/doublecrossing thieves/assassins/lawmen/etc. with a simple Maguffin and a zillion rounds of ammunition and overheat, then sit back and see who survives. Like KFC chicken, it's not good for you and you'll probably regret it later (especially if you stick around for Aces' terrible one-twist-too-many ending), but Joe Carnahan’s loving and/or shameless transfer of Lock, Dogs & Two Smokin’ Snatches to a Lake Tahoe casino serves as a more-or-less satisfying delivery system for a whole bunch of tasty, testosterone-flavored empty calories with better-than-necessary performances from a cast including Ray Liotta, Matthew Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Nestor Carbonell, Common, a luminescent Alicia Keys and about a hundred other people, including a way-too-serious performance by Jeremy Piven as the sleazy informant everybody else in the movie wants to save and/or kill.
THE LIMEY (1999), Also Not Directed by Quentin Tarantino
One of the strengths – and weaknesses – of Steven Soderbergh as a director is that he's extremely competent, and at times even brilliant, without having anything that approaches a distinctive style. A jack-of-all-genres and master of none, he produces one good movie after another, none of which seem to have any isolatable quality at which you can point and say "ah, there we have it – the Soderbergh trademark". Even when his films are visually distinctive and structurally inventive, they seem not so much expressions of Soderbergh's own filmmaking style as they do intense evocations of the work of other directors. It's not that Soderbergh is a chameleon, or worse yet, a copy-cat; no one, especially me, would accuse his films of being derivative. It's just that he often seems like he's inadvertently channeling someone else when he creates his very engaging films. Case in point: this terrific, energetic neo-noir is one of Soderbergh's best films, and one of the best crime movies of its era. But The Limey bears many of the hallmarks of another very successful filmmaker. The clever chronology, the complex structure of the storytelling, the brilliant use of two-shots, the mastery of integrating popular music with on-screen action, and the resuscitation of '70s icons like Terence Stamp, Lesley Ann Warren and Peter Fonda to deliver powerhouse performances are all indicative of the work of Quentin Tarantino (who, at the time, had been idle for several years, lending credence to the notion that The Limey could be a project of his). The film's use of period objects (including footage from 1960s Terence Stamp movies to represent younger versions of his character here), pop-cultural obsessions (Luis Guzman's t-shirts bearing the images of controversial political figures), and even the characters (most especially Nicky Katt as a foul-mouthed, junk-obsessed hitman) all collude to make this seem like a lost Tarantino flick – but it's all Soderbergh, all the time, if for no other reason than in the The Limey, unlike a typical Tarantino movie, the director is master of his gimmicks and not the other way around.
RESERVOIR DOGS (1992), Not Directed by Ringo Lam
It's a fine, fine line between 'homage' and 'rip-off'. That line is trod to a greater or lesser degree by a lot of the movies on this list, and whenever someone remakes or adapts a film by another director, no matter how careful they are to pay tribute to their inspiration, someone's not going to get the message. (For a prime example of this, consider how much heat Martin Scorsese took for The Departed, even though he not only openly acknowledged the influence of Infernal Affairs, but credited its writer on screen.) The line gets a little more smudged when the director is an inveterate film buff who makes no secret of sampling bits and pieces of his favorite flicks in everything he does, and whose notion of a tribute is very similar to many people's notion of a wholesale theft, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. So similar is the film to Ringo Lam's 1987 Hong Kong gangster exercise City On Fire – they share a major plot point, similar styles and costumes, bits of dialogue, and even two scenes in their entirety – that it pretty much completely eradicates that line between tribute and remake. For Tarantino's part, he cites City On Fire as a favorite, but denies that his first major success as a director rips it off; at least one vocal opponent, filmmaker Mike White, did an entire short called Who Do You Think You're Fooling? comparing the two movies frame for frame and excoriating Tarantino for not giving Lam proper credit. To many, Reservoir Dogs is one of the best and most original independent films ever made, a movie that literally changed the face of moviemaking in its time; to others, it's just the best movie that Ringo Lam already made.
Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce