Snake bit

De Palma's latest is a feast for the eyes only

by Gerald Peary

SNAKE EYES. Directed by Brian De Palma. Written by David Koepp. With Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino, John Heard, Stan Shaw, Kevin Dunn, and Luis Guzman. A Paramount Pictures release. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Lincoln Mall, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

Everyone acknowledges that Brian De Palma is one of the most prodigiously gifted technical directors around, yet he persists in setting up shots resembling Rube Goldberg devices to call attention to his ability. And in most cases these showstopping tours-de-force only call attention to the weakness of the whole. Take the bravura sequence in his last potboiler, Mission Impossible, in which Tom Cruise lowers himself into CIA headquarters -- neat, certainly, but it just makes the messiness of the rest that much more obvious.

In Mission, it is true, De Palma was at the mercy of two warring writers and a superstar who was also a producer. But what of his deluded 1992 brainchild Raising Cain, with the no-holds-barred finale that epitomized its lunacy? He was the auteur behind that debacle, as he is with Snake Eyes. His new film, however, is that rare anomaly, an intellectual entertainment that almost succeeds in wedding, à la his mentor Hitchcock, sardonic thrills with an icily subversive subtext.

Almost but not quite. At the heart of the picture is a seeming one-take, 20-minute sequence (Snake Eyes, with Saving Private Ryan, appears part of a new trend of films one can walk out of after the first half-hour assured of having seen the best part) that establishes every major element -- characters, setting, plot, themes. Exhilarating and challenging, it's a beginning that's never quite fulfilled.

In a scene initiating a motif of overlapping screens and conflicting points of view revealed with seamless tracks, tilts, and pans, detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) regales the camera with a typically obnoxious rant. "I'm on TV!" he beams, and as the camera draws back, so he is, standing next to a monitor showing a live "Powell Pay-Per-View" broadcast of a prizefight at the Atlantic City Boxing Arena. Santoro becomes our guide through the bowels of the blowzy labyrinth, from the rowdy dressing room of defending champ Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw, who makes George Foreman look like a flyweight), where he places a bet and shakes down a drug dealer for a payoff, to the ringside seats where his old friend Navy commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) has enlisted him to help out with security for the Secretary of Defense, who's attending the fight. As the bout gets under way, Dunne leaves his seat to question a suspicious redhead, a white-clad blonde accosts the Secretary, shots ring out, and the Secretary goes down.

What happened? The opening continual loop is full of suggestions, clues, and misdirections that beg close attention but don't all pay off. As the arena is sealed off and Dunne bemoans his mistake, Santoro pursues his own investigation. He browbeats Tyler, who was none-too-convincingly KO'd moments before the shooting, into telling his story -- the first of three flashbacks to the event De Palma unreels in an unsteady first-person point of view, à la The Lady in the Lake. Realizing that all is not as it seems, Santoro sets out to track down the mysterious woman in white (a feisty Carla Gugino).

As in De Palma's far more accomplished Blow Out, what starts out as a simple mystery becomes a critique of perception, of the validity of our own senses and memory and the devices we create to enhance them. De Palma's visuals find him at the top of his witty form -- one scene in which Santoro and an arena security chief pore over a bank of surveillance monitors, only to be repeatedly distracted by trivia, is a compendium of The Medium Is the Message and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

When it comes to plot and character, however, Snake Eyes comes up empty. Such ominous foreshadowings as a giant globe awash on the arena roof at the mercy of an approaching killer hurricane promise a clarification that never comes. The mystery that actually is revealed is both implausible and anticlimactic. Not to mention incomplete -- apparently an entire scene involving a flood was eliminated because it didn't work out.

Such lapses would be forgivable had the film exploited the talents of its cast. Instead, De Palma's emphasis on artifice brings out the artificiality that sometimes plagues Cage's performances. His Santoro is as loud and tasteless as his suit coat and as superficial; when it comes time for him to face a moral crisis, he hams it up like a kid in a high-school play. Sinise seems crabbed and uncomfortable; only Gugino shows any spontaneity, though she falls victim to De Palma's penchant for putting his heroines in the position of a prostitute. In the end, when floodlights white-out the scene and the TV cameras roll and the truth is revealed, Snake Eyes lives up to its name.

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Re-Mission

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