Snake Eyes . Austin Chronicle . 08-10-98

Snake Eyes

DIRECTED BY: Brian De Palma

REVIEWED: 08-10-98

Snake Eyes is a gamble, a chancy proposition. Confined to a single setting -- a sprawling Atlantic City sports arena/casino -- and intricately plotted, it requires a good degree of concentration and a healthy suspension of disbelief to succeed. Question its logic too much, and the whole thing unravels. Snake Eyes comes up a winner, however, largely due to De Palma's bravura direction, which falls on a near-perfectly modulated point on the spectrum of his work: It's halfway between the dispassionate gleam of Mission Impossible and the empty flamboyance of Body Double. From the very beginning, David Koepp's cagey script runs at full throttle, reaching the film's pivotal scene in the first 15 minutes or so, in which a controversial Secretary of Defense is assassinated during a boxing match. De Palma provides the frenetic energy to propel the storyline to this point and the effect is dizzying, both literally and figuratively. His kinetic camera tracks, pans, and swoops with such an ominous purpose that your brain can't possibly make sense of it all, converging in a noisy, eye-filling climax: It's sensory overload that ends in a bang. A seemingly endless number of questions jump from synapse to synapse at high speed during this time: Why does the sexy woman with flaming red hair flee from her seat just minutes before the assassination? What's the scraggly-looking guy yelling at the pugilists during the fight? What's the bespectacled woman with the platinum blond wig saying to the Secretary mere seconds before he's hit by a bullet? From that point of impact, Snake Eyes becomes a reconstructive thriller in which the chaos is explained, clarified, and elaborated upon, much like another De Palma film, Blow Out, in which a movie sound technician pieces together the clues to (yet again) another high-ranking official's death that smells of conspiracy. Where Blow Out is informed by aural clues, however, the clues in Snake Eyes are visual in nature. Surveillance cameras, tracking sensors, and videotape devices play a significant role here in the quest for uncovering the truth. (In many De Palma films, technology's ability to reveal and elucidate is both a blessing and a curse.) As the corrupt, rogue policeman investigating the murder, Cage -- the guy was born to act in a De Palma movie -- acts as the audience's guide along the narrative's convoluted path and, to a less successful extent, as the movie's moral conscience. He's best when shaking down a drug dealer for cash in order to place a bet on the match or bellowing, "I am the King!" with the mock bluster of a man who's too sure of himself; he's not as watchable when confronting the conflict between being a good cop or a bad cop. But even though Cage and the movie begin to sag near the film's middle, Snake Eyes picks up the pace again in a disorienting finale that takes place during the onslaught of a hurricane that, despite its incongruities and confusion, is oddly satisfying. After it has ended, you may want to view it all over again, just to see if you can beat the odds and pick up on what you missed the first time around.

--Steve Davis

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