When Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes was first released, it was met with abysmal reviews. I think this was due to two main reasons. First, it’s a whodunnit cop procedural that reveals the identity of the main antagonist about halfway through its run-time. Second, even for a De Palma film it is unusually obsessed with the concept of spectatorship: there are several sequences shot with newsroom cameras; deliberately choreographed tracking shots; a crucial scene is done with his trademark split-screen technique. The result is a mystery film with no mystery that repeatedly reminds its audience that they are, in fact, watching a movie. In a sense, these Brechtian techniques result in a kind of anti-thriller. But that’s what makes Snake Eyes so compelling: it’s not the mystery that’s important, it’s how the people involved in the mystery are effected by it. Nicolas Cage—in a performance that seems like a warmup for his later turn in Werner Herzog’s The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)—is downright heart-breaking as an unapologetically corrupt police detective who is forced to deal with a devastating betrayal. One scene in particular left my jaw on the floor. It’s a moment where Cage explodes at a woman who helped him identify the mastermind behind the assassination around which Snake Eyes revolves. The reason for his anger? Her revelation forces him to become the last thing he would ever want to be: a good, honest person. There would have been no way to seamlessly incorporate such a scene into the film if it had waited until the end to pull back the curtain on the identity of the killer.
8/10
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