Nicolas Cage is undoubtedly a national treasure (pun intended). His over-the-top action style has led him to become a massive fan favorite in almost every film he stars in, but it took years for him to achieve that status. Back in the 90s, Cage won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in Leaving Las Vegas and quickly followed that up with a string of massive blockbusters. What’s interesting about these movies, though, is that they show Cage finding his particular style. In some of the films, he chews the scenery with aplomb, like as Castor Troy in Face/Off, while in others, he takes a more down-to-earth approach, like Stanley Goodspeed in The Rock and Seth in City of Angels. Then there’s his role as Cameron Poe in Con Air which is… a weird one for sure but great, nonetheless. However, Cage had one role in the 90s that seamlessly blended his two acting styles and allowed him to play into both sides of his personality, and that film was the 1998 crime thriller Snake Eyes.
The Plot In a Nutshell
Written by Brian De Palma and David Koepp and directed by De Palma, Snake Eyes follows Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) on the final boxing match of the Atlantic City Arena before it’s torn down and rebuilt as part of a billionaire capitalist’s latest hotel and casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Santoro isn’t a boxer; he’s actually a police detective. However, after witnessing some of his earlier interactions with certain people, it’s clear Santoro’s morals are a little bit tarnished.
Santoro meets his old friend, Navy Admiral Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) who is at the match as security detail to the Secretary of Defense (who also happens to be friends with the billionaire capitalist). As the boxing match gets underway, gunshots ring out, and the Secretary of Defense is shot. Also shot is a woman who snuck in to speak with him, but she manages to escape in the chaos of the crowd before Santoro can question her.
The movie follows the mystery of who shot the SecDef and why, although that mystery gets cleared up rather quickly. Once the audience learns of the true culprit, the remainder of the film is spent on Santoro and his acceptance of the truth, as well as showing him wrestle with his baser instincts and choosing to do “the right thing.”
Influenced By Film Noir
What’s interesting about Snake Eyes is how many classic film noir tropes it contains. The detective with questionable ethics. A series of seemingly discordant instances that tie directly into the bigger picture. A gallery of shady characters who each have a finger in the pie. The mysterious and sexy “dame” who’ll prove to be the key to unraveling the whole conspiracy (played by the criminally underrated Carla Gugino). If not for the modern setting, this film could easily have been adapted from a Raymond Chandler short story.
Along those lines, much of the film is presented in a series of flashbacks from the character’s point of view, showing the audience exactly what they witnessed during that time. However, not everyone is telling the truth, and that gets reflected in the way their story is shown, which not only confuses Santoro and his investigation, but confuses the viewer as well. This is an interesting filmmaking technique in that it also mirrors the murder mystery tales of the 1920s. Some characters will be forthright with the detective, telling them exactly what they know, while others are a little more suspect, hiding some details or outright lying altogether. By presenting events in this way, De Palma allows the viewer to determine who they believe, or at least who they want to believe, until all of the facts come to light.
De Palma Knows What He’s Doing
Director Brian De Palma is truly skilled in the ways of filmmaking, boasting credits like Carrie, Scarface, and Carlito’s Way. Snake Eyes could have been another notch in the belt of his successes. However, it’s rare for the film to come up in conversations concerning great movies. But why? Perhaps his directorial style turned off modern audiences at the time. De Palma makes frequent use of panning and tracking, showing seemingly insignificant details within a scene while another action happens elsewhere. As is the case with Snake Eyes, there are a few shots that track through walls or over ceilings, showing other, innocuous actions happening between two important characters. Perhaps this sort of movement became off-putting to some viewers, leaving them feeling dazed.
But I don’t think so, as one of the major talking points concerning Snake Eyes when it was released was the twelve-minute One-Shot that kicked off the film. In filmmaking, a One-Shot is a single continuous shot that encompasses all of the action happening at one time. These types of shots are difficult to do as they require every actor and stuntman to hit their mark perfectly, remember all of their lines and actions, and for all special effects to go off flawlessly. While the One-Shot in Snake Eyes doesn’t involve any special effects, it did require some perfectly on-point choreography, such as Luis Guzman scaling a chainlink fence in time for Cage to round a pillar and catch him. These types of shots are time-consuming and difficult to accomplish, which is why directors love them so much, as they allow the director to push their creative limits and test their skills. And De Palma’s opening of Snake Eyes is masterful and adds a great element to the film itself.
A Completely Different Ending
I think the true culprit as to Snake Eyes’ less-than-ideal legacy is due to the last-minute changes to the script. Written by both De Palma and David Koepp, the film that was released in theaters is very close to what was conceived on the page with one pretty drastic change: the ending. In the script, the storm that rages throughout the film was meant to wreak havoc on Atlantic City, symbolically cleansing of the corruption and betrayal that Rick Santoro and Kevin Dunne embodied. However, after test audiences balked at the mass destruction of a New Jersey city, the ending was changed to something… less than ideal. While it still involved the storm to some degree, the third act just kind of petered out, with the film’s antagonist choosing the easy way out. It’s quite ironic that some people didn’t like the original planned ending and as a result, we got an ending that more people, including the director, liked even less.
To a further point, the Biblical destruction of the city fits best with another theme that ran throughout the movie: that of the all-seeing. At an event like a boxing match, cameras are everywhere, capturing all of the action as it unfolds. Such is the case in Snake Eyes, where the cameras become a necessary witness to Rick’s acceptance of the events. One such camera is a mini blimp that flies over the crowd, recording a 360-degree view of the arena. This camera is significant because it has a giant eye painted on the balloon itself. The literal “Eye in the Sky,” or more poetically, the “Eye of God.” While rewatching Snake Eyes, this eye reminded me of another famous literary eye, that of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg of The Great Gatsby. And just like Eckleburg’s eyes, the balloon witnesses all of the moral failings in Snake Eyes.
And all of that is a shame as Snake Eyes is a great film, for the most part. But for every good that it accomplished, like the 13-minute One-Shot opening scene for which it’s best remembered, it takes a fatal misstep, like not trusting the writers’ visions and following through with the story they intended to tell.
Unfortunately, it also relied on Nicolas Cage to sell the film. Despite being a great actor, Cage was a relatively new household name at the time. Even his other successful films had him playing alongside a Hollywood Heavyweight: Sean Connery in The Rock, John Travolta in Face/Off, John Cusack and Malkovich in Con Air. Even though Snake Eyes featured the likes of Gary Sinise and John Heard, both amazing actors in their own right, but they clearly weren’t enough of a box office draw to make the movie a success.
On top of that, the film was released two weeks after Saving Private Ryan and two days after Halloween H20, meaning it had some tough competition for movie-going audiences. Snake Eyes managed to rake in just over $100 million worldwide during its release, but that was considered a failure when its $73 million budget is taken into account. It also began a series of flops for De Palma, Mission to Mars, Femme Fatale, and The Black Dahlia. It’s a shame to think that a director like De Palma would have fallen so far after having massive successes in Hollywood, but to paraphrase Gary Sinise in this very movie, “Sometimes you got nothing, kiddo. Snake eyes.”
