The first twenty minutes of Snake Eyes explodes off the screen with an orgiastic frenzy of multi-sensory imagery that is so exhilarating it's hard not to feel let down when the movie proves unworthy of all the fuss.
Snake Eyes is a tale involving military, political and personal corruption that is at the same time sordid and idealistic. Nicholas Cage, giving us yet another variation on his Elvis-via-Brando imitation, is Rick Santora, a cop with many vices (he gambles, steals from crooks and cheats on his wife, for starters). And he's the GOOD guy. Santora ends up investigating the attempted assassination of the US Secretary of Defence, which occurs at a heavyweight title fight. Amphibian-eyed Gary Sinise is solid as Kevin Dunne, Santora's best friend and a key advisor to said Defence Secretary. Dunne fears he will be found derelict in his duty, since the Secretary was his responsibility.
The equipment used to cover the fight allows director Brian De Palma to indulge some fetishes he first exposed in his much-superior political assassination thriller Blow Out. Like an overeager puppy, De Palma incessantly inserts his hyperactive camera into the action until one feels the urge to tell him to sit and stay. Despite this attention-seeking behaviour, there is no denying that Snake Eyes' clever tracking shots, skewed angles and unusual points-of-view are inventive.
Now, if he only had a top-quality script. Snake Eyes so quickly disintegrates into formula, and the characters into caricatures, that it completely loses steam by the halfway mark. Perhaps not coincidentally, that is when (for some bizarre reason beyond my ken) De Palma chooses to reveal who the chief bad guy is. From that point on, the film becomes a series of set pieces, which only serve to show off De Palma's genius with the camera while we wait for the inevitable, predictable and tedious denouement.
