SNAKE EYES (1998)
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Written by: David Koepp
Ingredients: Hurricane, assasination, conspiracy, honest cop.
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino
Synopsis: A boxing heavyweight title fight is held in a stadium in Atlantic City, NJ as hurricane winds and rain rage outside. The fight is attended by the US Secretary of Defense and his entourage of Navy men and industrial associates. The Secretary of Defense has heard rumors of corruption, and intends to meet a secret contact who claims to have information, but he is assassinated by a sniper during the title fight, leaving 15,000 people to be detained as police witnesses during the tropical storm.
The policeman in charge of the overall investigation is Rick Santoro (Nicholas Cage), a flamboyant cop of dubious morality who wears loud clothes, gambles incessantly, and reaches for his cellular telephone more often than a bookie or agent. Santoro may be corrupt and well-connected, but he's also a competent investigator, and soon smells a murderous conspiracy. Trouble is, all the suspects keep winding up dead, until only one is finally left, and the final confrontation begins.
Opinion: Nicholas Cage fans will enjoy this movie, because Cage does a masterful, if slightly over-the-top job of playing the intriguing main character, Officer Santoro. In fact, Cage bails this movie out.
With a director like Brian De Palma you know automatically that the movie's cinematography will be tight, that the movie will not be boring, and that it will feature neat visual angles and suspense. That's probably why the setting is a hurricane: so we can have lots of lightning flashes and suspenseful shadows, De Palma style.
But the weak script of Snake Eyes creates a problem: basically the story is too predictable to be a whodunit since we can all guess who the bad guy is after only two seconds. Given a weak and somewhat unbelievable story line, how do you prevent boredom and revive suspense without resorting to ridiculous special effects, action stunts, and extraneous car chases?
SNAKE EYES solves the problem by shifting its focus from whodunit to character sketch. For example, instead of the big question being, "Who's the murderer?" the movie focuses heavily on Cage's intriguing character, and then pops the question, "How will poor Nicholas Cage react when he finds the murderer's identity?" And so we sit through the movie as Cage does his investigations all the way until the final confrontation, just to see how poor Cage reacts. This new focus - - with emotional suspense substituting for action-based suspense - - combined with strong acting and snappy dialogue keeps us sufficiently hooked. Somewhat predictable and fakey, Snake Eyes nevertheless entertains.
Reviewed August 15, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
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