Snake Eyes

A little background about the Hollywood summer: It ends on July 31. Sure, summer technically doesn't start until June 21 and ends in September, but in Tinseltown, it officially starts Memorial Day weekend (and, if you look at the success of Crimson Tide, Twister and Deep Impact, it really starts the first week of May) and ends in July. August, it's been said, it where all the bad movies go to die quiet deaths in the theater. Movies that get August release dates get them because the studios fear they won't stand up well against the competition, though the reason they'll tell the public is that they don't want to compete against their own movies. The Fugitive surprised everyone back in 1993 when it made a ton of money with an August release date. In this decade, nothing like that has happened again.

And Snake Eyes is not going to be any different.

How this movie attracted such talent as Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise and the once great Brian DePalma is beyond me, because it fails to deliver on nearly every level. The acting is fabulously bad, and pacing switches from slow to crawling, and the payoff is anything but. While I'm watching this movie wondering how many different ways I'm going to slice and dice it, my friend Steve is looking at his watch and my girlfriend Deb is dozing off.

Cage plays Santoro, a gleefully corrupt Atlantic City cop on his way to see old friend Commander Kevin Dunne (Sinise) ringside at a big boxing match on the boardwalk near the casinos. The first shot of this movie is a doozy, because it's a massive twenty minute tracking shot, where the camera follows Cage as he gets a call from his wife, beats up a local hood for "protection" money, gets a call from his girlfriend, and finally meets up with Dunne. But it doesn't stop there. DePalma keeps going, with the camera swinging back and forth between the audience and the boxing ring, creating a dizzying effect where you're not sure what you're supposed to be looking at. And that's when the shot breaks out, and the Secretary of Defense, sitting in the second row right behind Cage, is dead.

Now, a little background about this movie. Snake Eyes originally started out as part conspiracy thriller, part disaster movie. While all of this action is taking place, there is a hurricane howling outside, with the plot supposedly culminating right as the storm reaches its peak. But the storm wound up on the cutting room floor, for the most part, and all we have left is thriller. But even that doesn't work because there are very few surprises here.

A good conspiracy is one that most people would never guess, and while they had a good idea about retelling the story of the moments right before the assassination from a few different perspectives, they all wound up pointing in the same direction, where a better move would have been setting up several different people as potential suspects.

Keep the audience guessing, like in The Usual Suspects. There was very little question who the bad guys were here.

PLOT REVEALER SECTION COMING!!!!!! READ THIS ONLY IF YOU HAVE NO INTEREST IN SEEING THE MOVIE AND NEED A GOOD LAUGH!!

Okay, everyone who thinks Gary Sinise is the bad guy, raise your hand. Very good, you all raised your hands.

Even before they started filming this movie, I knew Sinise was the bad guy. And when he takes off to follow some woman sitting by herself ringside because she didn't have a ticket, only to have the shots that kill the Secretary of Defense come from that same direction, you know he's the bad guy. But even so, they could have held that plot device at least another 30 minutes. You get Sinise's perspective first, which was the only real attempt to throw the scent off a bit, about ten minutes before the movie reveals him as the bad guy. What they sorely needed was someone else, ANYONE else, who also had motive to kill the Secretary of Defense. There wasn't. All signs point to Sinise.

What really bugged me is that he disposes of a couple crew members in a way that was lifted almost directly out of the movie Ransom, where he was also too quickly revealed as the bad guy. There's a scene where Cage finally gets proof positive that Sinise is involved, something he doesn't want to admit to himself because he grew up admiring Sinise and thought he was a straight arrow, that is just painfully long, with no suspense, no decent dialogue, and a very awkward use of the movie's title. Like Steve said, Sinise should have looked at the camera, like Phil Hartman would do in those Sassy skits on SNL, and say "Looks like you got (turns to camera) Snake Eyes." I may have given it an extra half star for that. But alas, not to be.

The payoff is just ridiculous too, because you can tell they were going to use more of the storm footage but cut it out, apparently after the test audiences said "What's up with the wave?" By itself, it looks even sillier. By that point, however, it hardly matters, because the movie has already lost you and you're wondering how a 99 minute movie can seem so long.

PLOT REVEALER SECTION OVER

Snake Eyes was written by David Koepp, a very well paid screenwriter who fancies himself a little more clever than the average bear (see Mission: Impossible). But the fact
is, most of his output has been anything but clever (Jurassic Park and Lost World, The Trigger Effect). This one started out promising, and it's as if he just stopped writing and let his five year old take over. DePalma had the odds stacked again him big time, and he seemed forced to use some technical camera wizardry to distract us from the fact that there's nothing special going on. And he still failed. Cage hasn't acted this badly in a long time, maybe ever. He's impossibly over the top, as is Sinise. And John Heard, who only had one real scene in this movie, chose over the top for his method of acting. I'm wondering whether anyone has gotten an Oscar nomination under DePalma's direction. After seeing this amd Mission: Impossible, I'm betting against it

Cage and Sinise are better actors than this, and I'm sure the real reason Cage took this movie was the paycheck. But sometimes there is a price for taking a movie for the money: credibility. I never went to see a movie simply because Cage was in it before this, but if I had, I'd be very wary going forward after this one.