De Palma's Snake Eyes is a movie that most people will hate, and with good reason. It has a preposterous plot, hammy performances, and a sudden climax that will strike some as a cheat. But Snake Eyes also has a gloriously kinetic first hour, and some juicy character vignettes. That may not be enough for the casual filmgoer, but devotees of a director's work tend to take what they can get, settling for style when the substance is weak.

Snake Eyes stars Nicolas Cage as Richie Santoro, a corrupt Atlantic City homicide detective with a wife, a kid, a girlfriend, and a network of lowlifes greasing his palms. An old buddy, naval commander Kevin Dunn (Gary Sinise), gives Santoro ringside seats to a heavyweight championship fight at a casino, but the evening turns sour when the secretary of defense (whom Dunn was guarding) is assassinated.

This setup is all established in the bravura 15-minute tracking shot that opens Snake Eyes. De Palma stays on Cage's face and body (occasionally panning over to what he's seeing) as he moves through the arena, talks on his cel phone, shakes down a bookie, expends several hundred volts of nervous energy, watches the first round of the fight, and gets splattered with blood as the secretary is shot in the throat. Suddenly, Santoro senses an opportunity to help his friend and to get his face on television. He starts barking orders and handling the media, and as he reviews the reels of security tape, he determines that this was not the work of a lone gunman.

Cage overacts like crazy in Snake Eyes, but he keeps the picture moving, and his natural charisma overcomes his constant shouting. (Besides, his character is supposed to be a blowhard.) As Santoro untangles the conspiracy, he meets one by one with the principals, and Snake Eyes indulges in a series of Rashomon-like restagings of the assassination. Meanwhile, Cage's eyes narrow as Santoro's interest in honest police work is gradually rekindled.

Snake Eyes takes a wrong turn, though, once De Palma and screenwriter David Koepp reveal the identity of the conspiracy's mastermind only an hour into the film. The focus shifts from what Santoro sees and hears to a split between Santoro, the mastermind, and their mutual quarry a mysterious eyewitness, played by Carla Gugino. The switch in perspective gives De Palma a chance to pull off some startling effects. He puts us behind Gugino's myopic eyes, as she struggles to focus without her glasses. And as Santoro and the mastermind close in on her hotel-room hideout, De Palma gives us a marvelous overhead shot that travels from room to room, passing through walls.

Granted, these are the money sequences in a De Palma film the ones that have fans chuckling gleefully but they come at the expense of what had been a taut, compelling narrative. As long as De Palma and Koepp stick with the flawed Santoro and all the broken people he meets in his investigation, Snake Eyes has a real raison d'etre. Like Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, the film uses a non-linear thriller format to explore lives of pain and degradation an interdependent society of losers. Once it turns into a routine (if stylish) game of cat-and-mouse, the sillier story elements half-assed coincidences, a sloppy master plan, unconvincing motivations, a convenient hurricane begin to wear down the viewer. The meticulously detailed mise-en-sc�ne of the first hour is abandoned, and several story points seem to disappear, perhaps to the cutting-room floor. Cage's expressionistic acting, meanwhile, ceases to be endearingly quirky and becomes downright dissonant.

It would be a mistake, though, to underestimate Snake Eyes completely (as most major critics have already done). The knock on De Palma has always been that he's a soulless Hitchcock imitator, but while he's employing Hitch's techniques, De Palma touches on our relationship to cinema, and on the ways we reduce the flashpoints of our culture political scandals, war, murder, psychological theory to diverting entertainment. Even though Snake Eyes doesn't follow through on its early promise, and it lacks a devastating summary image like The Killing's final blizzard of money, De Palma does fiddle amusingly with the way we trust our own eyes when we should go to the videotape.

What excites a fan, though, is that Snake Eyes is the first "real" De Palma movie in years. His last film was Mission: Impossible, one of the slickly competent commercial pictures that De Palma can make when forced to; prior to that, he made Carlito's Way, a technically dazzling crime saga with no thematic weight. These films are entertaining, but there's nothing daring about them they don't risk pissing off their audience. For all its unforgivable lapses in plot, Snake Eyes has the wit and, yes, style, of an original filmmaker, along with a sucker-punch ending that is completely in keeping with De Palma's character. That may only mean something to cultists, but speaking as one, I was grinning like a fiend through most of the film. After all, snake eyes is only a losing roll if you haven't bet on it.