Brian De Palma’s films are more or less split into scuzzy, lower-budget horny exploitation Hitchcock pastiches—his more personal work—and big-budget mainstream genre exercises. Snake Eyes (1998) is stranded in the middle; a Hollywood action/heist flick that’s not as grimy as De Palma at his grimiest but isn’t as polished as Casualties of War, The Untouchables or his dress-up-for-a-paycheck work.
Exploring the middle-ground didn’t result in commercial or critical raves Roger Ebert’s one-star review, in which he called Snake Eyes “the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down” sums up the consensus reaction.
Snake Eyes isn’t a great film. But I didn’t feel let down at the end either. De Palma’s over-the-top, high-camp style has rarely met such a simpatico actor as Nicolas Cage, who plays corrupt detective Rick Santoro with a delightfully open-hearted sleaze that perfectly complements De Palma’s joy in the downmarket pleasures of sex, violence, and amorality. The stunning, extended first shot is a marvel of dueling virtuosic crassness; De Palma follows Cage through the bowels, stairs and tunnels of an Atlantic City arena, as Rick flirts by phone with his wife and mistress, places bets on the upcoming boxing match, and shakes down a crook for cash, all while engaged in self-satisfied chatter or occasionally bellowing, “It’s fight night!” The sequence is a mini-love letter to New Jersey, Hollywood, and America as a land of carny excess and extroverted vice.
It's true the movie can’t live up to that first sequence—but there aren’t many movies that could. Ideally we’d just watch De Palma follow Cage around that arena for 90 minutes, but commercial realities dictate there has to be a plot.
This one is fairly off-the-rack; the Secretary of Defense is assassinated while watching the fight in what turns out to be a conspiracy led by Rick’s DOD best friend Kevin (Gary Sinise.) The easy thing would be for Rick to look the other way and take a payment for his silence, but that would involve abandoning Julia (Carla Gugino), the young defense analyst who figured out that the missile defense system Kevin is committed to doesn’t work.
Santoro’s is an antihero in the mode of Rick from Casablanca or Han Solo—the scoundrel with a conscience. The movie doesn’t do anything interesting with that trope, choosing instead to opt for gratuitous stylistic set pieces.
Fine by me. De Palma structures the film like Rashomon but with additional video technology, so you see the same events over and over from different angles as different people remember them, and then sometimes again from the perspective of surveillance cameras. There’s also a wonderful sequence panning from room to room in a hotel from above, with the roof removed, so you see the seedy goings on in each isolated space, an orchestrated cornucopia of gambling, sex, and drunkenness.
Cage turns the hands-shaking-as-you-light-your-cigarette cliché into a preposterous crescendo of anxiety. Then he overacts even more stupendously after a beating, staggering and moaning as he drags himself down yet another hallway, thumping into walls, unable to choose the right direction over and over.
The climax doesn’t make much sense, but that’s not unusual in these kinds of films, and Rick’s simultaneously cynical and idealistic comeuppance is a nice twist to the usual default happily ever after. This is a film that looks like it should be Hollywood dreck and in some sense is Hollywood dreck, but the creators approach it with such a gaudily imaginative love of dreck that it’s almost genius. I don’t really understand why this isn’t generally recognized as a cult classic, but if you have any affection for De Palma or Nicolas Cage and haven’t seen Snake Eyes, you’re missing out.