It's fitting Brian De Palma calls his latest suspense thriller Snake Eyes, because the film is a bad roll of the dice.

Not that it didn't have potential. In his continuing effort to prove he can make a Hitchcock film better than Hitchcock, De Palma starts with elements that Hitchcock would have loved: a murder-mystery, confined to one location -- an Atlantic City casino/hotel/convention hall during a hurricane -- and a story that, until the very end, unfolds more or less in real time. Nic Cage stars as sleazy cop Rick Santoro, who leads an investigation after the U.S. Secretary of Defense is assassinated during a Heavyweight Fight.

The film is most famous for its opening act, which purports to unfold in one, seamless take. It's one of those ten minute steadicam tracking shots that De Palma is famous for. The camera follows Cage around the arena and we get introduced to all the characters. The only trouble is, the shot is a trick -- it's not really done in one take. In fact I counted about 17 cuts (watch carefully every time there's a swishpan or an extra walks in front of the camera). It's not like De Palma had any choice since it's a known fact Steadicams can only hold about two minutes of film at a time. The illusion of one seamless shot does give the sequence a great energy, but De Palma is so busy choreographing everything that he forgets to actually have something interesting going on in front of the camera.

With the film's one marquee sequence turning out to be a fraudulent failure, there's not much else left to enjoy. To solve the crime, Cage teams up with an old friend, played by Gary Sinise, who's now a Naval Security officer. (In an odd in-joke, Sinise's character is named, Kevin Dunne, while the actor, Kevin Dunn, has a small supporting role.) Also in the mix is the fetching Carla Gugino, who plays another one of those Hitchcock cliches -- the mysterious woman who changes her appearance.

Unfortunately there isn't much of a mystery to unravel. The entire murder-plot is revealed about halfway through, and the so-called "revelations" aren't very surprising. With all the suspense lost, there's not much to keep us interested aside from the multiple times that De Palma lets us (guys) see Gugino in her underwear. The big finale is confusing and flat. De Palma doesn't set-up the geography of the casino clearly enough so it's hard to figure out where the good guys are supposed to be and where the bad guys are supposed to be when the big showdown is playing out.

The movie is also burdened by some huge holes. Somewhere in the middle of this thing, a crowd of 20,000 manages to disappear and is completely forgotten about. Then there's the question of why the killers would pick such a difficult way to kill their target. Fortunately, we can just dismiss Snake Eyes as the bad movie it is, and not waste any more time thinking about worry about such details.

(c) Copyright 1999