“Our title this week of course refers to Catch and Release, a film which has been so endlessly trailered on TV (and we don’t even watch that much) that Torontoist feels like we could recite the whole bloody film right now. ‘The man I was going to marry is dead! I’m sitting wearing my wedding dress and moping – it’s a girl thing! Kevin Smith is fat and talentless, but friends with Ben Affleck so he can be in this! I’ve fallen in love with you now, sexy and stereotypical unshaven male lead! The End!’

Is that about right? Now’s Glenn Sumi joins us in being incredibly bitchy about a film that looks so depressingly targeted (and without soul) that it makes us want to catch Jennifer Garner in a big net and release her into the ocean. By which we mean ‘drown her.’”

So! A couple of things worth noting here, because I do discuss Smokin’ Aces a bit in this piece. First up, Joe Carnahan is pretty pissed off about the critical reception, as you can see from his blog, which is unfortunate, but far more interesting (and newsworthy) is that Smokin’ Aces is in Second Life!

Yep, they created a version of the Nomad hotel in the game and there’s, like, weapons and stuff to play a game called “Second Life Assassin.” I was momentarily thinking about booting up Second Life to give it a shot, but I didn’t as

a) I uninstalled Second Life recently
b) Thanks to Second Life’s rubbish client/controls, it’s almost certainly unplayable.

That’s just an educated guess, however! It could be, against all odds, wonderful. That’s so unlikely however that thinking about the amount of money that Universal will have sunk into the project has me rather annoyed. For a similar amount of cash I’m certain you could get a talented team to produce a short game (or even just a mod) that would be more worthwhile. I guess without Second Life they wouldn’t even think about making a game, though.