Brian De Palma’s latest film, Snake Eyes, is a crafty thriller
that is powered by perspective. It’s a movie all about angles,
from the slanted camera shots to the varying points of view of
the players.
When we meet Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), he’s mugging in front
of a news camera set up at the site of a big boxing match in an
Atlantic City casino arena. Rick’s next acts are for off-camera
only. As he struts around the arena in a shiny suit blabbing into
a gold cell phone (switching calls back and forth from his wife
and girlfriend), he takes a moment to shake down a drug dealer
to finance a hefty bet on a fight. Rick establishes quickly that
he is more or less a thug, and with a flash of a badge, he reveals
that he’s also a cop.
Rick is at the fight courtesy of an old childhood chum, Kevin
Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is overseeing security at the fight for
the visiting Secretary of Defense. As much as Rick is sloppy and
loose, Kevin, a Navy man, is neat and tightly wound. Rick orders
Kevin to relax and enjoy the fight, but Kevin spots a suspicious-looking
redhead and leaves his seat to check her out. Meanwhile, a woman
in a white suit and blonde wig takes the seat vacated by Kevin.
In the following seconds, a drunk causes a ruckus, the boxing
champ gets cornered, the Secretary gets shot, and the blonde takes
a bullet, too, loses her wig, and disappears into the crowd.
From that moment on, the film turns to unraveling the mystery
– but not so fast. Good guys turn bad, bad guys good and back
again. Stories are told, and events replayed so that the only
thing that’s for certain is that none of it matches up. The seeing-is-believing
(or not) motif plays a big part in this film, and it has a mirror
reflected in a mirror reflected in a mirror infinity. There are
pay-for-view cameras circling the arena and security cameras recording
everything in the casino. Then there’s the film’s own camera work,
which may show a scene bathed in red or take us up and over the
casino’s hotel rooms to see what’s going on behind closed doors.
All of this works with the action. Characters slip in and out
of a scene so that they’re caught in the corner of your eye; the
good guys and bad guys narrowly miss each other; and everyone
is nervously looking over his or her shoulders. Watching this
sort of bobbing and weaving is the fun part – even when you could
care less about some big-deal government conspiracy – and with
the characteristically exuberant performance by Cage and the cold,
solid one of Sinise, it all adds up to make Snake Eyes pretty
much a sure bet.
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