Snake Eyes

Corrupt businessmen, corrupt boxers, corrupt cops, right-wing fanaticism, terrorism, a tropical hurricane and Nicholas Cage – just the ingredients Brian De Palma needs to dress up with showily garish visual kineticism in a fast-paced thriller that keeps doubling back on its narrative to show the same events, established in the film's tour-de-force opening Steadicam sequence, seen from different perspectives.  Unsurprisingly given its increasing implausibility the critical reception in its day was largely negative but especially for fans of Cage's histrionics Snake Eyes is an entertaining enough, if never convincing, film. 

We first encounter Cage as sleazy police detective, Rick Santoro, at an Atlantic City stadium where a world heavy-weight boxing match is about to go down. If Santoro wasn’t on coke then Cage probably was as he yells, struts and gesticulates like a man possessed, fielding calls from his girlfriend and his wife on his cell phone, placing five large with his bookie and shaking down a petty mark (Luis Guzmán) to pay for it, De Palma regular Stephen H, Burrum's camera swinging and swooping high and low and from left to right all the while.

It’s enough to make one's head spin but it is also the centre-piece to which the film keeps returning to explain what really happened when visiting Secretary of Defense (Joel Fabiani) a boxing fan (you’d think he had better things to do) is shot ringside and Rick’s best friend Cmdr. Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is in charge of security for the Secretary, shoots the shooter dead but feels responsible as he left the Secretary unguarded while he went in pursuit of a buxom red-head. Rick, a past master of covering his tracks leaps to his friend's defence and begins to investigate, looking for a woman (Carla Gugino) in a bottle-blond wig who handed the Secretary something immediately before he was shot.

Only moving locations from the stadium to the casino next door De Palma, who co-wrote the story with  David Koepp (who with Robert Towne wrote the director’s previous film, Mission: Impossible), keeps the pace intense as the plot thickens, throwing in for good measure visual flourishes such as an overhead tracking shot that shows the occupants of separate contiguous hotel rooms going about their business and cleverly uses the hotel's surveillance system to identify a guest’s room number

Unfortunately once the plot reaches its terminus post quem, the big (and drawn-out) good-guy, bad guy showdown, and the moral tables are turned, suddenly De Palma loses his mojo and starts to fall back on MOR conventions . Rick turns out to be a remarkably stand-up kinda guy and Kevin a singularly incompetent baddie, the final ten minutes or so providing a tiredly familiar exposition-heavy denouement followed by a corny and entirely unconvincing coda. It's hard to believe that De Palma and Koepp could have squandered so much good work, but that reflects the conflict between director's trash-loving side and his more mainstream allegiances. Having gone so far in the former direction it would have been better had he stayed there.

 

Want something different?