faced with a choice: accept a million dollar payoff to keep his mouth shut, or arrest his buddy.Stanley Kubrick once observed that "most films don't have any purpose other than to mechanically figure out what people want and to construct some artificial form of entertainment for them." People seek the familiar. Whether it be a familiar genre, actors, or a specific kind of emotional gratification, films have become delivery systems for the feelings that we crave. But director Brian De Palma is a bit of an anomaly. Like most of his thrillers, "Snake Eyes" has its fangs firmly in the past - in this case the conspiracy thrillers of Hitchcock, and Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" - and yet annoys those looking for familiarity precisely because De Palma is relentless in bending the film toward his own private concerns. And so, typical of De Palma, this is a film in love with penetrating space, with shifting points of view, with explorations of memory, vision and the corruption match fixing, blackmail, assassination, political spin festering beneath all glitz. The script, written by David Koepp, itself serves only as a framework for De Palma to indulge in his fetish-like obsession with seeing, subjectivity and the fallibility of images.Unsurprisingly, "Eyes" begins with a shot of a globe shaped statue. It's a nod to "Touch of Evil's" introductory Universal International logo, another trashy B movie in which a seedy tale of moral responsibility intersects with much camera wizardry. De Palma's camera then picks up a fumbling news reporter, her off screen director and a bank of television monitors, one of which shows Santoro jokingly addressing a camera. What then follows is a 13 minute single take in which De Palma gives us a tour of a boxing arena, familiarises us with its layout, and introduces us to the film's key players.The film spells out its concerns with this very first shot. The reporter's monologue serves as a precursor to the elaborate long-take that follows. One slip and everything must be restarted/re-staged for the eye. The film is a technical exercise, a juggling match, framed begining and end by the TV image. The globe and the thunder storm will themselves appear later during the film's finale and Cage himself is introduced as a vessel designed to command the lens. He's a loudmouth centre of attention who, quite literally, learns to pay attention to things outside himself.Much of the rest of the movie revisits this 13 minutes single-take from the perspective of different characters and cameras, none of whose optics can be trusted. Like most De Palma films, "Eyes" is thus primarily concerned with the dishonesty of the image. His camera is a snake, constantly prowling, searching, scheming and lying. One sequence, which recalls Jack Terry's patient rewind-and-play in "Blow Out", has Santoro watching a boxing KO from varying angles, as he tries to come to some measure of truth. Like Antonioni's "Blow Up", the film overwhelms us with its sheer number of lenses, points of views and visual trickery. A person can lie. A camera can lie. But a hundred cameras will add up to the truth more surely than a hundred fallible eyewitness accounts.The first 70 minutes of "Snake Eyes" are crammed with bravura set pieces and exhilarating camera work. The real star here is De Palma, whose camera prowls the arena with relish, dipping, ducking and whizzing back and forth. Cage, his character torn from the pages of pulp magazines, does his best to match De Palma's bravado. His performance is hilarious; seedy but with heart.During the film's final ten minutes, however, the film loses steam. There's no climax. But this ending was never intended. Like Orson Welles, much of De Palma's filmography has been tampered. "Obsession" had it's paedophillic sub-story removed by composer Bernard Herrmann, a prudish Tom Cruise had all the romance and sex scenes cut out of "Mission Impossible", "Black Dahlia" lost over 50 minutes of footage, "Mission to Mars" was subject to budget cuts which resulted in an abrupt last act and "Bonfire" was so rife with confusion that a book was written The Devil's Candy detailing De Palma's troubles with studios. "Get To Know Your Rabbit" and "Redacted" would face similar problems.The original ending of "Eyes" tied into the first shot, and included a massive action/CGI sequence involving the previously seen globe and a hurricane. This sequence was similar in tone to the end of "Femme Fatale", in which noir fate comes crashing down. But the studio's balked at the numbers and a cheaper ending was quickly tacked on. Still, the current ending is interesting in the way it pushes hard and fast past a typical happy ending. Rather than being redeemed, Santoro becomes a hero, only to be promptly brought up on corruption charges. In De Palma's world, past sins are never forgotten.8.9/10 - Spielberg and Fincher would later hire screenwriter David Koepp for "War of the Worlds" and "Panic Room", two films likewise preoccupied with cameras and space. Alfonso Cuaron would cite "Eyes" as an influence on "Children of Men" and De Palma's overhead "God's eye" tracking shot would be borrowed by Spielberg in "Minority Report". "Eyes" made the top of many lists in France, but is treated with scorn every where else. Worth multiple viewings.

post-modern nightmare.

dead.The saddest part? When everything that Dunne says to Santoro, that guys like him will crash and burn when exposed to the media. You cannot help but feel a little sorry for Santoro when what Dunne said comes true And they show it very quickly how he turns from hero to villain in just a few seconds .I also feel sorry that the film wasn't a box office hit that it deserved to be. I thought it was an excellent film and a lesson on doing the right thing: would you let things go the way it is or would you do everything in your power to change it, even though you may be dragged in the mud in the process? An interesting moral question and an interesting film.

character? So many clever questions.DePalma thinks the camera is a whole new thing, The camera is a type of character, part narrator, part actor, part god. It can lie, be fooled, search curiously, document, play jokes. So this is a film about the camera's eyes. `Snake' both because the camera can snake around following Cage, going places that Cage cannot, but also `snake' because the camera sees with forked tongue.So we have one seemingly continuous shot of the key scene, which is played first from Cage's perspective, then the fighter's, the Navy guy, the Girl, then the cop again, and finally the `flying eye.' Along the way, every eye trick DePalma can think of is woven in:--The girl's glasses are crushed so she sees less than the audience--The whole mess is about what a satellite sees--The casino has 1000 cameras which our own eyes coopt--The thing is framed by the TV eye--God-like, we scan over several hotel rooms while Cage and Sinese are stuck in the hallway maze--Splitscreen simultaneity--The whole thing is in real time, as if you were living in the actionThis is masterfully intellectual. See it. Forget the story.

corrupt role this was before his CSI: New York days and Carla Gugino was very easy on my eyes.Brian DePalma directed this, so you know it's going to be stylishly shot, too. This looks really, really good on the recently-released Blu-Ray.All the characters are interesting, actually. One complaint I agree with: the ending was a bit weak and detracts from the story. It's a rough film but edgy and interesting. Don't be discouraged reading a lot of negative reviews about this. It's good entertainment.

does exactly what Sinise's Dunne doesn't want him to do. He acts like a cop. He does his job, and along the, discovers a pretty good conspiracy that can relate to our times. All the flash and style of the film, from the extended opening shot to the angles, lighting, color and mood help surround these characters in an overwhelming sense of chaos and thrills. I've seen a lot of de Palma's work, and I still think films like Mission: Impossible or the Untouchables or even Carlito's Way are better than this film, but it still does not fail to be a great movie.