What’s this all about?
In 1998, when Brian DePalma (director of Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Untouchables) made Snake Eyes, a tense assassination thriller. A dirty Atlantic City cop and his childhood best friend, a high ranking Navy Commander must solve the assassination of the U.S. Secretary of Defense at a pay-per-view Heavyweight boxing match in an Atlantic City casino. Tensions are amplified by the impending landfall of a hurricane, and the 14,000 witnesses who are sequestered in the building.
There were a lot of this sort of movie made in the late ‘90s, like In The Line of Fire, Conspiracy Theory, and Enemy of The State. Most of them devolved into thinly-veiled action flicks. This one felt a lot more like a Hitchcock or Orson Welles movie, at least in terms of tone, eschewing gun fights and car chases in favor of tense conversations.
Who is Nick in this one?
Nick plays “Detective Rick Santoro,” a corrupt Atlantic City cop who robs drug dealers, gambles, takes bribes, and keeps a mistress on the side. He’s given a ring-side seat at a heavyweight boxing title match by his childhood best friend, and almost immediately gets pulled into a murder mystery.
Who else is in this one?
Gary Sinise plays “Commander Kevin Dunne,” Nick’s childhood friend, and the commander of the US Secretary of Defense’s security detail. He’s straight-laced and above board, which Sinise communicates by delivering one of the most wooden performances that I’ve seen in ages. He probably doesn’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
Kevin Dunn (Dave, Transformers) ironically doesn’t play “Kevin Dunne.” Instead, he plays “Lou Logan,” a pay-per-view TV announcer with dreams of being a real newsman like Dan Rather. He’s fine. Good, even. But that name thing sure is weird, right? Did they name the character “Kevin Dunne” before or after they hired the actor “Kevin Dunn?” I’m overthinking this, right?
John Heard (Big, Home Alone) plays “Gilbert Powell,” a Donald Trump-style crooked Atlantic City developer/industrialist. The performance is forgettable
Stan Shaw (The Monster Squad) plays “Lincoln Tyler,” the Heavyweight Champion of The World. He’s good, as always.
Carla Gugino (Karen Cisco, in Karen Cisco, which nobody but me has ever seen) plays a MacGuffin. She has a name, but it doesn’t matter. She’s a witness or a scientist, or a whistleblower, or something. The bad guys want to kill her, and the good guys want her to not get killed, and they spend the movie trying to find/save/kill her. The role could have been played by a roll of film, or a cat’s collar (I’m looking at you, Men in Black), but in this case it’s played by Carla Gugino, and she’s fine. Sometimes she can’t see at all, because she’s lost her glasses, and other times, her vision is fine, but whatever.
Luis Guzman and Mike Starr also have bit roles. They’re reliable character actors, and they get the job done, here. Luis is a drug dealer, and Mike is a gruff but capable casino security chief.
Did you see that?
The first “real” scene in the movie is a long, moving, uncut single take very reminiscent of the opening of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. It’s impressive in its length, and I’m sure it was a major feat to create, but it has two massive flaws.
First, it forces some pretty serious shoehorning to get all of the exposition that was needed into a single scene, and it dumps basically the entire first act down the audience’s throat in a single scene.
Second, to achieve the shot, compromises obviously had to be made with set layouts, camera angles, and lighting. This gives the entire, massive scene a rough-cut feel. As the scene wound down on our first viewing, Sarah asked, “does this scene feel badly edited?” When I pointed out that it was because it was an uncut single take, she said that she hadn’t even noticed.
Ultimately, DePalma went to a massive amount of effort to achieve a crazy difficult shot that I feel like the vast majority of viewers didn’t even notice. It added nothing to the film. It was just fancy film-making for the sake of fancy film-making.
DePalma broke out his entire book of trick shots, filling the film with character POV shots (scenes shot “through the eyes” of a character) and dollhouse shots (shots that pull back and reveal a cutaway view of multiple rooms, like looking at a dollhouse).
Unfortunately, the scenes fall a little flat, as they don’t ever really drive the narrative.
DePalma was clearly inspired by the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and who can blame him? Sadly, in Snake Eyes, he repeats some of their tricks, but fails to deliver on the story; but I’ll save that rant for later. -Michael
I’m going to skip ahead to the end of the movie. Actually, beyond the end. The song that played the movie into and through the rolling credits captured my attention. It was your typical 90’s trick of hiring a well-known artist/voice to sing a generic song that almost sounds like it could be good and basically summarizes the movie rather than having real lyrics. The voice was so familiar with this one. My first thought was Courtney Love, as the singer wasn’t all that good and seemed somehow out of tune, but at the same time intentionally so. But then she just wasn’t quite bad enough for Courtney Love. So then I thought it was Cheryl Crow, but something wasn’t quite right for it to be Cheryl, either. Before I could place it we got to the end of the credits, revealing that it was none other than Meredith Brooks, best known for the 90’s hit “Bitch.” Was that the only thing she was known for? I honestly can’t remember anything else she ever did. I guess performing “Sin City” for Snake Eyes just wasn’t the follow-up she was hoping for. -Sarah
What were Nick’s best parts?
The film includes a total contrivance of a subplot in which the production staff for the fight has used a camera mounted on a small remote controlled blimp to create some interesting shots during the boxing match, and unintentionally filmed the murder. This was apparently considered high-tech in the late 90’s, although the rig looked like it came straight from the Radio Shack Christmas flyer (I was there in the 90’s, too).
Anyway, Nick figures this out, watches the video, and discovers that his friend Gary Sinise was behind the whole plot. Sinise confronts Nick in the video booth, and a very typical mystery reveal scene plays out.
This would be a great, or at least normal place for Nick to illustrate his surprise and anger through some spastic shouting.
Instead, he delivers his lines in an emotional, but subdued manner that is entirely believable.
For the first time in the film, I actually felt like the two men were long-time friends who actually cared about one another. At least, that’s what I got from Cage. Gary Sinise played the whole scene like a 2” x 4” doing an Edward G. Robinson impression. -Michael
I liked the scene where Nick is sitting in a stairwell with Carla Gugino. What was her character’s name again? It really was forgettable. Anyways, she is telling him that Gary Sinise is the bad guy, but Nick doesn’t want to believe it. He portrays the realization that she is talking about his life long buddy and not just some stranger. This places him in the undesirable position of needing to either do the right thing, or possibly truly embrace being a really bad guy. Nick is not a great guy in this, but at the same time, he’s not exactly the type of guy that would knowingly let a bunch of people die just to make some money, either. Nick struggles with this and does a great job taking his anger and drama to the bring, but not going overboard. -Sarah
What were Nick’s worst parts?
The entire first scene (discounting the opening establishing shot with the news anchor), as mentioned previously, is a ridiculously long uncut single take, that moves throughout the backstage area of the arena, following Nick as he interrupts a TV broadcaster, takes multiple phone calls, hits on some woman, places some wagers, harrasses some celebrities, rolls a drug dealer, and finally takes his seat.
The scene needs to establish a few characters, and the fact that Nick is a corrupt cop, capable of at least a little violence. Despite the previously mentioned technical and story issues, it does this. For some reason, though, Nick plays it like he’s the drunkest frat boy at Mardi Gras.
He turns the douche-bag dial to “11,” screaming and shouting like an idiot. At one point, he sees one of the fighters in their dressing room (remember, he’s backstage at a title fight), and immediately points from across the hall and yells, “Hey! It’s Lincoln Tyler,” before running headlong towards the open door, before being repelled by the fighter’s security detail. Later, he stands by himself, and loudly chants the name of his High School mascot as the fighter and his entourage walk past.
He toned this down a fair bit for the rest of the movie. I can only assume that the difficulty of reshooting and resetting this crazy long scene allowed Nick to run far wilder than he should have. -Michael
I have to go to the end of the movie for this. Anything after the point where Nick had been beaten so badly that they had to put some prosthetics on his face to properly show he was a bloody mess. Nick was pretty stone faced through the entire movie and not doing a great job with facial expression or subtle acting, but add that crap on his face and he was barely delivering the lines coherently on top of it. -Sarah
How was the movie?
As I’ve mentioned, I suspect Brian DePalma was trying to make something like Orson Welles’ The Third Man, or Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. He takes some bold stabs at unusual filmmaking techniques and tells a mostly-tight story that delivers suspense and tension in most of the right places. Unfortunately, this film makes three critical errors that doom it to mediocrity.
First, the conclusion is sheer dumb luck. A meticulous plot that has been carefully unraveled throughout the movie finally comes to a head as our hero finds himself helpless and trapped with the villain, who is determined to kill both the hero and the MacGuffin. There’s no way out of this one. Classic end-of-the-second-act stuff, right? So what clever play or bold move does our hero use to bring the villain to justice? He waits for a previously un-established police van to accidentally crash through the wall of the building, and for the police inside to serendipitously take the villain into custody, despite knowing literally nothing about the situation.
This sort of lazy ending ruins the plot, which had actually been very well done up until this point. Imagine watching an episode of Columbo, and after Peter Falk has spent an hour investigating, being clumsy but helpful, and asking a hundred weird questions about how industrial bakeries work, or whatever, he finally confronts the killer, who, as usual, threatens to kill him. Then, instead of Columbo revealing that he’s been two steps ahead the whole time, and that the killer’s bullets are in Falk’s pocket, a helicopter falls from the sky and crushes the killer. It’s honestly inexcusable.
Second, when the story ends, DePalma just keeps making the movie. The admittedly unfortunate climax gets resolved by the arrival of some deus ex machina cops, Gary Sinise kills himself to avoid capture and Nick collapses beside the now safe MacGuffin, as the news crew captures the whole thing. The story is over. The only thing left for me to learn is who did the on set catering, and who the key grip was.
Then, we get a scene where Nick gets an award from the city. Then he goes fishing with his son. Then we learn that the company behind the military scandal that never really mattered restructured their management as a result of the scandal. Then we learn that some politicians got in a little trouble, too. Then we learn that not-Donald-Trump who was in three scenes didn’t catch too much heat. Then we learn that Nick’s corrupt cop behavior got exposed, and both his wife and his mistress abandoned him. Then we learn he’s going to do 16 months in prison. Then he meets again with the MacGuffin, a young leggy brunette with bright red lips, who, despite being pretty sure Nick was going to kill her throughout the rest of the film, promises to wait for him while he is in prison. Then the two of them kiss. Then construction workers work on renovations at the arena, which reveals that one of the many people murdered during the conspiracy has been hidden in a concrete casino pillar.
The story ended fifteen minutes ago, Brian.
Finally, and perhaps most damning, the casting of the leads in this film is simply terrible. This movie is about characters. It’s about the struggle between two lifelong friends, one an honest, honorable, upstanding military man who has devoted his life to service, and the other an adulterous dirty cop, who places illegal bets with stolen drug money to buy mink coats for his mistress while his wife and son sit at home. Both men have to decide for themselves what “right” and “wrong” mean, and then we watch the ensuing fallout. Nothing else matters. Not the boxing match, or the camera blimp, or the missile system. That’s just set dressing. The story is the characters. So, this movie needed character actors, not blockbuster leading men.
Think about Pulp Fiction. Why didn’t Tarantino cast Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio as “Jules” and “Vincent?” Would it have been as good if he had? I don’t think so (and I think Pitt and DiCaprio are excellent actors). Those roles needed characters that a leading-man type often struggles to deliver. That’s what happened here.
We don’t see a man destroyed as he finally finds the limits of his own morality, and makes the realization that he’ll have to sacrifice his one true friend to do what he has to do. Neither do we see a dedicated and honorable man, twisted by the horrors of war and the weight of command driven to commit the worst of crimes to achieve what he sees as a greater, larger justice.
We see Lieutenant Dan chase Nick Cage around for two hours.
The actors brought too much of their past works to the roles, and lacked the depth to overcome them. To be clear, I think Cage and Sinise are both capable actors. I think they were horribly miscast, and that isn’t their fault.
DePalma’s reach exceeded his grasp on this one. He’s like the kid at the High School talent show who is a genuinely good singer, but decides to do a Whitney Houston cover, and ends up looking pale by comparison. The screenplay for this film (which DePalma worked on) is inches away from being a gripping, edge-of-your-seat thriller. If he had spent more time fixing the issues with that, and less time doing stunt film-making, this could have been a really, really good movie. -Michael
How am I supposed to follow this? It was okay. Nothing special, but not horrible. Worth watching, but only once. -Sarah
Yeah, but did you like it?
This is not a bad movie. In fact, it’s better than a lot of its peers. Unfortunately, it tries, and ultimately fails to do a lot more. I’d never even heard of this movie before this marathon, and if you haven’t seen it before, give it a watch. The filmmakers were trying to do something great, and that’s more than I can say about a lot of other movies. -Michael
Yes. I liked it. -Sarah
Where can I watch it?
It’s free on Pluto TV.
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