Film review by Kevin Patterson
SNAKE EYES Rating: *** (out of four) R, 1998 Director: Brian DePalma Screenplay: David Koepp Story: Brian DePalma & David Koepp Starring Cast: Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino.
Many of the reviews of SNAKE EYES have labeled it a disappointment, and in some ways I can understand why: the previews promised an intricate, stylish murder mystery thriller, and it doesn't quite deliver that, at least not as well as it could have. The plot is complex and interesting, but the mystery evaporates within the first forty-five minutes and the thrills, while effective, are mostly of the fairly ordinary "is the good guy going to get out of the room before the bad guy opens the door" variety. What it does deliver, however, is an interesting inner conflict for a character who realizes it's time to clean up his act and may have to risk everything if he doesn't want an innocent woman's death on his conscience.
That character is Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), a corrupt Atlantic City police detective who routinely shakes down criminals for bribes. His longtime friend, Navy Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), is in charge of security for the Secretary of Defense at an Atlantic City boxing match, and he gets Rick a front-row seat. In the second round, Dunne gets up to question a strange woman sitting across the arena. A drunk stands up and yells at the fighters. The defending champ goes down. Then suddenly shots are fired, the Secretary is killed, and the woman who was talking to him stumbles away, wounded and afraid for her life. Director Brian DePalma is showing us the pieces to an intriguing puzzle, and in a way it's a shame he decided to put them back together before the 45-minute mark.
In any case, Rick starts investigating the murder, at first because it seems like a good PR opportunity. He eventually tracks down the wounded woman (Carla Gugino), who has information about the case that Rick quickly wishes he hadn't found out. He hides her in a basement room in the casino complex and is soon intercepted by the killer, who offers him a handsome cash reward in return for dropping the case and supplying the location of the woman. And we sense that while he has let the guilty go free quite a few times in his career, he still plays fair with the innocent. He doesn't want to betray the woman, even though his refusal to do so might lead to his death in the worst-case scenario and exposure of his past wrongdoings in the best-case scenario.
Most of the harshest critics of SNAKE EYES have panned the film on the grounds that the ending, which involves damage to the casino building by an approaching hurricane and a police van that arrives at a convenient moment, is a deus ex machina that erases the impact of what has proceeded it. For my money, they're right on the first count--it *is* a rather unlikely contrivance--but wrong on the second. This wasn't the best resolution that SNAKE EYES could have had, but the confrontation was still brought about by the characters' internal motivations. Had Cage's character made a different moral choice, neither he nor the villain would have been anywhere near the police van at the end.
SNAKE EYES is certainly not a perfect film, but on the whole it does more things right than wrong: the plot could have been handled a little better, but the suspense works most of the time, and DePalma adds some inventive direction to the mix, such as when he keeps the opening SteadiCam shot going for nearly twenty minutes without a cut, or shows the same scene from several different subjective viewpoints. And, most importantly, the Cage character is well-written and well-performed enough to pick up the slack whenever the storyline starts to wobble.
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