Police detective Rick Santoro Nick Cage attends a championship boxing match. Also attending is Navy Commander Kevin Dunne Gary Sinise , Rick's best friend. During the boxing match a bullet hits and kills US Secretary of Defense Charles Kirkland. What follows is a real-time mystery in which Santoro and Dunne seal off the boxing arena and work together to find the assassins. As the film progresses, Santoro gradually comes to realise that there's a conspiracy behind the assassination and that Dunne is involved. Santoro, an unscrupulous cop with a history of taking bribes, is thus <more> 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. <less> |