Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Universal has released a UHD for the 2006 Joe Carnahan film 'Smokin' Aces.' New content includes a 2160p/HDR video presentation and a DTS:X lossless soundtrack. No new supplements are included, but the UHD disc houses the core content from the 2010 release.

Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The included screenshots are sourced from a 1080p Blu-ray disc.

Though it is more than a decade old, Universal's 1080p Blu-ray release of Smokin' Aces still looks great: it's very filmic and effortlessly so, capturing a fine sense of grain management, overall clarity, and color excellence. The UHD takes a fine Blu-ray and improves upon the experience with an even more flattering and naturally occurring grain structure that compliments the content with an underscored, but still mood-critical, grain structure, allowing for that rough and gritty feel to be accentuated, at least a little, by the medium's properties themselves. Core textural clarity enjoys a tangible spike, offering higher yield clarity and sharper detail presentation. That said, the image is a mite on the soft side and lacks the absolute razor sharpness of some other pictures. Still, it's a very film-like and the firm foundation presentation certainy enhances definition to skin details, hairs, clothes, and any number of visually agreeable locations.

The new HDR color grading is probably the more immediately obvious and impressive improvement on this disc. The presentation is reliably bold and brilliant, taking the already warm-ish palette and accentuating its filmmaker intended characteristics for bold color splashes, pop, and black level depth. The UHD offers a range of color nuance and intricacy not available on the Blu-ray while boasting improved nuance, amplification, and stability. Bold primaries leap off the screen yet still remain grounded and true to the intended color timing. Black level depth is very good, not as purely deep as some other UHDs, but still impressive. The same may be said of skin tones and white pop and balance as well. The UHD shows no immediate signs of compression related issues and the print appears to be in fine shape, absent any debilitating pops or speckles.

Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Universal upgrades Smokin' Aces' audio presentation as well, now delivering the film into the home with a DTS:X soundtrack. The presentation is not dramatically different from the Blu-ray's 5.1 offering, but the sense of added fullness and immersion is most welcome. The core elements hold for overall clarity and detail as well as musical pronouncement and placement, gunfire depth and precision location details, and dialogue centrality and prioritization. Listeners will appreciate the extra channels which enhance surround integration and bring more life to action. There are no real discrete elements engineered into the top end, but that added spatial awareness does solidify the listen. Listeners will be pleased.

Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This UHD disc for Smokin' Aces includes all of the core bonus features from the 2010 disc but is absent some of th peripheral stuff, like bookmarking functionality and U-Control. The bundled Blu-ray is identical to that same 2010 release. See below for an outline of what's included and please click here for full coverage. A Movies Anywhere digital copy code is included with purchase.

• Deleted and Extended Scenes (1080p upscaled, window box, 9:34): Include are Longer Bar Sequence, You Ain't No Chinese, Elmore Crawls Out of Lake, and Alternate Rooftop Parking Lot.
• Outtakes (1080p upscaled, window box, 9:28).
• Cowboy Ending (1080p upscaled, window box, 1:04).
• The Line-Up (1080p, 1.78:1, 13:27): Included are Buddy Israel, The Feds, Lethal Ladies, The Tremor Brothers, and Bounty Hunters.
• The Big Gun (1080p, 11:53).
• Shoot 'Em Up: Stunts & Effects (1080p, 4:52).
• Audio Commentary: Writer/Director Joe Carnahan and Editor Robert Frazen.
• Audio Commentary: Writer/Director Joe Carnahan, Common, Christopher Holley, and Zach Cumer.

Smokin' Aces 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Smokin' Aces is something of an acquired taste film. It is not for everybody but it features most everyone and most everything one could possibly want from a character sprawl Action film. Of the film, Ken Brown wrote that it "could have been a career-ending misfire [but has become]...an ultraviolent cult favorite." Universal's new UHD release (there is also a SteelBook for the collectors out there) offers solid UHD video and audio. This is not the cream of the UHD crop, but fans should be pleased. No new extras are included but Universal brings over most all of the legacy content onto the UHD disc itself. Recommended.