Snake Eyes (1998)
Conspiracy thriller by Brian DePalma, of Scarface and Mission Impossible 1 fame, starring Nicholas Cage.
The American Secretary for the Ministry of Defense, now War, is murdered attending a boxing match at a New Jersey hotel and casino. An islamic terrorist is quickly blamed for the attack, Cage plays a sleazy cop, just happening to attend the same boxing match, trying to suss out who really did it. Now, let's get the obvious piece of trivia out of the way, right away: the murdered politician's name happens to be Charles Kirkland and he dies after being shot through the throat. This quaint little bit of life imitating art with a 27 years delay aside, peculiar as it is, Snake Eyes is a very entertaining movie.
For one, because it's directed incredibly well. DePalma pulls out all his favourite tricks for this one and he has certainly mastered them well at this point. Tracking shots, matter of fact starting on an over 10 minutes one, split screens, POV shots, the same events seen from different perspectives with all the details kept consistent, rarely has anyone ever directed a movie as hard as DePalma directed Snake Eyes. The other one is because about half of the movie consists of Nicholas Cage yelling at people, which is sort of an intrinsically entertaining thing to watch.
The story itself mostly goes through the motions of a vaguely neo noir whodunnit, interestingly mainly for its compact, contained setting, a New Jersey resort during a storm. Although some paranoiacs ears may perk up, learning that some of it was shot in a real Casino owned, at that point, by Donald Trump. All that aside though, there's nothing particularly bold about Snake Eyes thematics. Hardly anyone will be surprised by the revelation of who did dun it, which comes about halfway through the movie. It was the Military Industrial Complex, at the gambling parlor, with a sniper! The MIC, this is a spoiler, her mostly embodied by a cartoonishly sinister Gary Sinise. Add to that a sexy whistleblower in over hear head (Carla Cugino) and a fixed boxing match and you've got all the moving part for what's definitely a very fun movie, if at its essence a conventional one
I enjoyed Snake Eyes quite a bit, make no mistake. It's breathlessly fast paced, extraordinarily well directed, the dialogue is snappy, Cage is giving it his all and everyone opposite him is doing their best to keep up, it's all very finely honed blockbuster film making. It's just the rather limp payoff that stops the movie from going out on a high note and, honestly, just feels a bit like a compromise to convention. I just learned that originally, the movie was meant to end on the hurricane tearing down the entire hotel and casino, which, I suppose, is the kind of goofy formalist gesture they just didn't let you get away with at that point anymore but I think I might have preferred. The actual ending which technically amounts to "Well, we found the individuals responsible and we made sure to hold them accountable"... you know, I feel like the 90's were just about the last decade where that wouldn't get you laughed out of the room.
Snake Eyes is a pretty good movie though, no doubt about that. It just falls short of being as transgressive as you'd hope for that kind of subject matter. Which doesn't make it worse, it just makes it less interesting than it could have been. In essence, it's still an incredibly tightly written and directed thriller with a killer presentation. It just falls short of transcending its material, in essence turning conspiracy into quaint murder mistery that's resolved in 90 minutes. A pretty good one, certainly, but it's not an ending that'll still with me the way the final scene of DePalma's earlier foray into the genre, Blow Out, did. Now that's how you end a movie, man...
Conspiracy thriller by Brian DePalma, of Scarface and Mission Impossible 1 fame, starring Nicholas Cage.
The American Secretary for the Ministry of Defense, now War, is murdered attending a boxing match at a New Jersey hotel and casino. An islamic terrorist is quickly blamed for the attack, Cage plays a sleazy cop, just happening to attend the same boxing match, trying to suss out who really did it. Now, let's get the obvious piece of trivia out of the way, right away: the murdered politician's name happens to be Charles Kirkland and he dies after being shot through the throat. This quaint little bit of life imitating art with a 27 years delay aside, peculiar as it is, Snake Eyes is a very entertaining movie.
For one, because it's directed incredibly well. DePalma pulls out all his favourite tricks for this one and he has certainly mastered them well at this point. Tracking shots, matter of fact starting on an over 10 minutes one, split screens, POV shots, the same events seen from different perspectives with all the details kept consistent, rarely has anyone ever directed a movie as hard as DePalma directed Snake Eyes. The other one is because about half of the movie consists of Nicholas Cage yelling at people, which is sort of an intrinsically entertaining thing to watch.
The story itself mostly goes through the motions of a vaguely neo noir whodunnit, interestingly mainly for its compact, contained setting, a New Jersey resort during a storm. Although some paranoiacs ears may perk up, learning that some of it was shot in a real Casino owned, at that point, by Donald Trump. All that aside though, there's nothing particularly bold about Snake Eyes thematics. Hardly anyone will be surprised by the revelation of who did dun it, which comes about halfway through the movie. It was the Military Industrial Complex, at the gambling parlor, with a sniper! The MIC, this is a spoiler, her mostly embodied by a cartoonishly sinister Gary Sinise. Add to that a sexy whistleblower in over hear head (Carla Cugino) and a fixed boxing match and you've got all the moving part for what's definitely a very fun movie, if at its essence a conventional one
I enjoyed Snake Eyes quite a bit, make no mistake. It's breathlessly fast paced, extraordinarily well directed, the dialogue is snappy, Cage is giving it his all and everyone opposite him is doing their best to keep up, it's all very finely honed blockbuster film making. It's just the rather limp payoff that stops the movie from going out on a high note and, honestly, just feels a bit like a compromise to convention. I just learned that originally, the movie was meant to end on the hurricane tearing down the entire hotel and casino, which, I suppose, is the kind of goofy formalist gesture they just didn't let you get away with at that point anymore but I think I might have preferred. The actual ending which technically amounts to "Well, we found the individuals responsible and we made sure to hold them accountable"... you know, I feel like the 90's were just about the last decade where that wouldn't get you laughed out of the room.
Snake Eyes is a pretty good movie though, no doubt about that. It just falls short of being as transgressive as you'd hope for that kind of subject matter. Which doesn't make it worse, it just makes it less interesting than it could have been. In essence, it's still an incredibly tightly written and directed thriller with a killer presentation. It just falls short of transcending its material, in essence turning conspiracy into quaint murder mistery that's resolved in 90 minutes. A pretty good one, certainly, but it's not an ending that'll still with me the way the final scene of DePalma's earlier foray into the genre, Blow Out, did. Now that's how you end a movie, man...
