Snake Eyes (1998) ***
It had been a long time coming for me to finally get around to seeing Snake Eyes (1998), being that I consider Brian De Palma one of my Top 20 Directors and I admire a great deal of Nicolas Cage's acting work. In 1998 both the actor and director were at high points in their career, success-wise—De Palma with his prior film, the hugely popular and financially lucrative Mission: Impossible (1996), and Cage having recently starred in three action blockbusters: The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), and Face/Off (1997).
And while Snake Eyes is undoubtedly entertaining, and contains all the usual De Palma visual trademarks (split diopter shots, split screen, and a very impressively long tracking shot just after the opening credits) and despite the fact that it contains the talent behind and in front of the camera that it does, it rings a bit hollow. The filmmaking is incredibly slick and there's a lot of dazzling editing. De Palma taps into his typical bag of Hitchcock worship, but Snake Eyes largely plays as his version of Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), as characters retell events and we the audience view those events in flashback, from the various perspectives.
But the story just isn't as engaging as the director's expansive body of work up until that point. It feels like Hollywoodized De Palma. Even Cage, known for being intense and over the top in his method, only goes unhinged occasionally, making for a performance that never truly thrills. Nor does he or any of the characters have any truly memorable dialogue. The ending feels very anticlimactic as well. All in all, Snake Eyes is a fun film and one I'd revisit, but it's lower tier De Palma and Cage.
You can find my Brian De Palma Feature Films Ranked list here.
And while Snake Eyes is undoubtedly entertaining, and contains all the usual De Palma visual trademarks (split diopter shots, split screen, and a very impressively long tracking shot just after the opening credits) and despite the fact that it contains the talent behind and in front of the camera that it does, it rings a bit hollow. The filmmaking is incredibly slick and there's a lot of dazzling editing. De Palma taps into his typical bag of Hitchcock worship, but Snake Eyes largely plays as his version of Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), as characters retell events and we the audience view those events in flashback, from the various perspectives.
But the story just isn't as engaging as the director's expansive body of work up until that point. It feels like Hollywoodized De Palma. Even Cage, known for being intense and over the top in his method, only goes unhinged occasionally, making for a performance that never truly thrills. Nor does he or any of the characters have any truly memorable dialogue. The ending feels very anticlimactic as well. All in all, Snake Eyes is a fun film and one I'd revisit, but it's lower tier De Palma and Cage.
You can find my Brian De Palma Feature Films Ranked list here.
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