My World of Flops Coked up Case File #174 The Travolta/Cage Project #53 Snake Eyes (1998)

One of the many wonderful aspects of this project is discovering the many areas where the careers of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage overlap and intersect. 

Before I started watching Snake Eyes, for example, I hadn’t really thought too much about Travolta and Cage both making commercially unsuccessful paranoid political thrillers where they played flawed professionals investigating a dense web of lies and deceit reaching high into the corridors of power for Brian DePalma. 

It’s damn near impossible not to compare Snake Eyes to one of DePalma’s true masterpieces, the haunting, damn near perfect 1981 thriller Blow Out and for the deeply flawedSnake Eyes to not suffer terribly from the juxtaposition. 

With Blow Out DePalma set out to make a film of Hitchcockian mastery and control. He succeeded. Snake Eyes, in sharp contrast, just wants to be trashy entertainment, b-movie sleaze executed with panache, and gets about seventy percent of the way there.

DePalma’s not aspiring to art or greatness here. He wants to have fun. When star Nicolas Cage is hollering at the top of his lungs with the kind of enthusiasm and deafening volume that comes easily to people who are zonked out of their mind on cocaine Snake Eyes is an absolute blast. 

The movie ends up anticipating the future of Nicolas Cage’s career in that respect. Cage roars out of the gate playing a charismatic madman who isn’t about to let his job as a detective keep him from committing as many crimes as possible, ideally on the job and for big fistfuls of dirty cash, soaked in blood if need be. 

When he’s luxuriating proudly in his character’s unrepentant sleaziness and 24/7 hustle Cage is tons of fun. But when he has to dress like a cop and act like a cop and solve crimes like cops do in seemingly every fucking movie ever made he becomes much less flamboyant, colorful and entertaining. 

Snake Eyes embodies the strengths and limitations of the Nicolas Cage cop movie. The Nicolas Cage parts, where the cult icon gets to put his unmistakable stamp on often generic material and indulge in his great love for over-acting are generally way more fun and memorable and distinctive than all of the cop stuff. Yet Cage has ended up playing cops in movie after movie because those are the kinds of projects that get made because those are the kinds of films that are commercially successful. Hopefully that will not be the case going forward.

The film follows suit. When DePalma is showing off with a ridiculously decadent budget topping seventy million dollars Snake Eyes is a giddy triumph of style over substance. But when the attention shifts to solving the crime at the center of the spectacle the movie’s vulgar charm begins to dissipate. 

A gloriously typecast Nicolas Cage hungrily devours scenery as antihero Detective Richard "Rick" Santoro, who isn’t an unusually dirty cop but rather the very embodiment of sin. 

Rick has pretty much every vice. He cheats on his wife. He cheats on his mistress. He accepts bribes. He solicits bribes. He angrily extorts bribes from small time criminals who wish to remain on his good side (most notably Luis Guzman, in a scene-stealing turn as an honest crook who just wants to be left alone to do crimes) and out of jail. Rick is also a gambling addict more than willing to bet more than he can afford to lose. 

In other words, Rick is very much in his element in the grubby gambling paradise of Atlantic City, New Jersey’s answer to Las Vegas with all of the sleaze and sin but a fraction of the star-power and glamour. 

BFFs!

Outside the arena a storm rages but inside the crowd is agog with excitement and anticipation over a match between heavyweight champ Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw) and contender Jose Pacifico Ruiz. 

Rick is excited to reunite at the fight with his oldest and dearest friend Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is on hand to watch the champ defend his title but more importantly to protect the flashy, attention-hungry Secretary of Defense. 

Rick and Kevin are unusual best friends in that they have nothing in common and do not seem to like each other. They’re a study in contrasts. Kevin is a consummate straight-arrow, an ambitious career man laser-focused on getting ahead while Rick is a skirt-chasing, money-grubbing, cocaine-snorting sleaze bag out to get whatever he can in the moment regardless of the consequences. 

Then again the two men became friends much earlier in life, affording them decades to grow apart. The reunion is cut short when Kevin is ostensibly so distracted by ogling the large, shapely breasts of redheaded bombshell Serena (Jayne Heitmeyer) in a low-cut, cleavage-bearing dress that he briefly abandons his sacred duty and the big-shot he’s protecting is killed by an assassin’s bullet. 

It is quickly established that the assassin is a disgruntled Palestinian angry over the United States’ relationship with Israel but the official explanation for the assassination is way too tidy and neat for Rick. So he begins an investigation to find out what really happened. 

The redhead with the distracting cleavage turns out to be part of a sinister conspiracy masterminded by our hero’s oldest friend to keep a whistle-blower from revealing crucial information that would keep an an expensive weapons system from being sold to the military. 

Carla Gugino costars as Julia Costello, a mysterious woman in a blonde wig who comes to the fight with crucial information to give the Secretary of Defense and gets so close to him that she’s splattered with his blood when he’s killed. 

To fit in with the fight crowd, Julia wears a trashy blonde wig, then tries to escape from the men who want her dead by pretending to be a sex worker intent on taking tourist Ned Campbell (David Anthony Higgins) to his hotel room to show him a good time. 

Snake Eyes’ treatment of its two female characters is so ridiculous and extreme that it becomes meta-commentary on the way women are seen and portrayed in DePalma’s movies in particular but Hollywood films in general. 

Julia Costello is a brilliant, heroic whistle-blower willing to risk her life to do what’s right. Serena is a highly-trained, highly disciplined operative and part of a complicated, successful plot to eliminate a high-ranking cabinet member but in order to fit into this world and play your part effectively you need to dress in a manner designed to coax men into ogling your boobs so intently that they forget about everything else. 

These strong, accomplished women turn themselves into ditsy sex objects designed to be leered at by horny, aggressive men, the audience and a camera perpetually set to “Male Gaze.” This is a Brian DePalma movie after all, where the cost of entry for women generally involves being a sex worker, dressing like a sex worker or pretending to be a sex worker for various reasons. 

If Snake Eyes were made in 1977 I have no doubt that our ethically challenged protagonist would keep doing bumps of cocaine every twenty minutes, like clockwork, to keep his energy and focus up along with the film’s. 

I love the coked-up energy that Cage and DePalma bring to Snake Eyes up top but when that intoxicating, disorienting rush subsides we’re left with a rickety screenplay about a convoluted conspiracy it’s damn near impossible to care about.

With Snake Eyes, DePalma attempts something approaching pure cinema, a film ruthlessly devoted to exploring the outer limits of cinematic style at its most pugilistic and punishingly macho. So why does so much of Snake Eyes feel like mediocre television, 24 with a director encouraged to really go to town with every trick he’s ever dreamed of?

To use the current cultural parlance Snake Eyes ends with its anti-hero getting Milkshake Ducked. He’s heralded as a hero for uncovering the sinister conspiracy to assassinate the Secretary of Defense but the blinding media spotlight also uncovers a history of corruption, bribery and of course sweet, sweet cocaine. 

Out anti-hero is sentenced to go to jail for a long stretch for his many, many crimes, with the consolation that Julia might be waiting for him when he gets out. 

I was pleased to see that Snake Eyes’ scuzzy, criminal protagonist would at least suffer some punishment for all of the horrible things that he’s done but I can’t say I felt anything about it one way or the other. 

That’s Snake Eyes in a nutshell: an entertaining, flashily acted and aggressively directed piece of big-budget pulp with characters and a central conspiracy that are damn near impossible to be emotionally invested in.

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiascocess, or half Fiasco, half Secret Success

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