The film always seems bound to go over the edge, to get too enamored of its own confidence. Much of the allure of Snake Eyes has all to do with the way it's the movie equivalent of an expert mountain biker who prefers to ride, for miles, on the edge of a cliff rather than on the feet-away paved trail. (In comparison to the foam-mouthed Cage, Al Pacino, who was so feral in 1983’s Scarface that we wouldn’t have been surprised if he ate one of his own limbs for a midnight snack, is by comparison more demure than an ingenue.) The difference lies in De Palma’s own stylistic tricks, like long-tracking shots (beautifully offered during the opening) and split-screens, as well as his welcoming of scenery-chomping acting performances.
Split screen snake movie#
By incorporating The Killing’s storytelling structure into the main investigation so closely, De Palma makes his movie feel less like a nod and more a mimicking - in line with his decades-long habit of artistically borrowing. But Snake Eyes and The Killing nonetheless feel entwined. It instead orbits around an attempted assassination of the defense secretary at a boxing match, with the Rick character trying to figure out whether the crime is connected to a Lincoln-level conspiracy. Snake Eyes diverges, mostly, in that it isn’t about a heist. It traversed time and focused-on characters for the sake of offering an as-full-as-possible understanding of the motivations, and the minutiae, that pushed the all-important crime forward. That film, which is an eminent heist thriller, was about the fleecing of a money-counting room at a racetrack, and is still distinctive for its multi-view storytelling style.
Snake Eyes owes a lot to The Killing (1956). Figuratively in that the corrupt cop at the center of the movie, Rick (a wonderfully over-the-top Nicolas Cage), will not get a true idea of the conspiracy driving the movie until he’s heard multiple accounts from witnesses who aren’t him. Her big wire-rimmed glasses, which causes everything in front of her to appear blurry.
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