Product Description
An assassination attempt thrusts a detective into a murder case with 14000 potential suspects and a deadly conspiracy where nothing is what it appears to be. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 05/17/2005 Starring: Nicolas Cage Gary Sinise Run time: 98 minutes Rating: R Director: Biran De PalmaAmazon.com
Brian De Palma’s 1998 thriller is largely an exercise in airing out his orchestral, oversized visual style (think of his Blowout, Body Double… More >>
December 18th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
i didn’t like the movie. it didn’t make sense. i like nick cage but he should of pass on this movie. face off was better.
Rating: 1 / 5
December 18th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
I’m not going to waste time writing, it’s just a bad movie
Rating: 1 / 5
December 19th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Brian DePalma wastes no time taking viewers inside his noirish conspiracy thriller set in Atlantic City during a hurricane. His opening shot flows for over 15 minutes, uninterupted, introducing every character you need to know in that short time frame. He interweaves between TV point of view to the actual casino in record breaking time, and in breathtaking fashion.
Nicolas Cage as Rick Santoro is so perfectly cast as an over the top cop on the make, that it’s so easy from the very beginning of the film to forget it’s only a movie.
Between the very first shot of the politician and his entourage, including two powerful characters in the film played by Gary Sinise as Kevin Dunne (a friend of Rick’s), a political figure played by John Heard, the female newscaster, Rick Santoro, a sleazy news reporter (played by Kevin Dunn), a bookie that owes Santoro a dept (played by Louis Guzman), the boxer Lincoln Tyler (played by Stan Shaw), his promoter, and everybody else involved in the ‘conspiracy’, as well as everything you need to know about the story, whether seen or heard, are all shown to the viewer in that short time span.
After the assasination takes place and all h*ll breaks loose in the casino, we are then taken on a journey of trying to solve the crime in a very Agatha Christie/Karasowa’s “Rashomon” style that is utterly breathtaking in every scene, every flasback, and every version of what you see or what you are told. Everyone’s story is slightly different, so no one knows who is telling the truth until the end of the film.
And, DePalma employs so many terrific camera angles and devices and tricks, that the film should be kept in a film school vault and studied every year for the next couple of decades.
From a mysterious redheaded woman to a blonde who is revealed to be a brunette with a wig on (played by Carla Gugino), from following a bloody hundred dollar bill to a ruby red ring, DePalma sets us on the coarse, working from a great script by David Koep (who scripted “Mission: Impossibe” and “Carlito’s Way”), putting things right before your very eyes, and/or in your ears, just to have you questioning everything and everyone you see on screen.
And, the dark humor/irony is delicious! Especially when Rick recieves a phone call from a show girl, saying she’s his lucky number seven right as the assasination takes place.
The slogan “Believe everything except your eyes” was a perfect tag line for this 1998 classic psychological mystery, noirish conspiracy thriller from the Master of Suspense. Because, after the film is over, and you know the way the plot turned out, then go back and view it again, you see that DePalma shows everything you need to see in the first 15 minutes of the film, and it’s all right in front of your very eyes!
And, be sure to watch this film all the way until you see the words “The End” pop up to know just how sinister this story really is. Hint: A ruby red ring in stone.?.?.
And, when DePalma returns his camera back outside the arena, and the storm is raging, thus is the build up to a very awesome climatic scene in what is already established as a VERY noirish story/film.
Awesome! I would rate it a LOT higher than just 5 stars if possible.
Brian DePalma really hit a solid homerun for his fans with this classic, exposing just how evil, ugly, and sinister the world of Atlantic City really is.
And, the song at the end of the film By Mercedes Brooks, called “Sin City” is awesome, and the lyrics recap the story of the film.
Definetly the best film Nicolas Cage has EVER been lucky enough to be cast in, and his best performance by far!
Highly recommended! Thank you.
Rating: 5 / 5
December 19th, 2009 at 3:19 am
Obviously an endangered plot convicted and deceived by a fabulous director such as Brian De Palma (Mission: Impossible, Carrie), an experimentally creative and enjoyable writer like David Koepp (Jurassic Park), and two superior actors that could easily make the top “20″ best actors of the 20th Century List (Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise), would be quite a pull-off for Hollywood these days. This film takes a slick beginning featuring Cage in some of the longest film shots ever created (thankfully De Palma’s work). Cage is there the whole time, taking his collective and explotive character to a snoopy and dog driven edge which will raise a thought- “Is he a pain in the neck that won’t go away?, or, Is he just a very easily-ammused, outgoing being who’s climax and philosophies of life revolve around the world’s attentivness towards him?” However, the traditional bad boy cop character starts kicking in when he starts flerting with a white-blonded female who happens to sit right next to him (taking his best friend’s seat). And may I add that his flertation begins right after finishing a conversation with his wife, whom he is apparently “happily” married to. His excuse is that he cannot seem to bare sleeping with the same woman for twenty years. Does it sound happy to you?
Then, following is a serious assassination involving the killing of the Secretary of Defense at this Boxing Match in which there are numerous suspects and possibilites. De Palma sets it up so strategically and annoyingly blaze, that the audience can’t seem to follow. There are many stories through the several different characters Cage interacts with to get his investigative story. However, a few of the stories don’t seem to cope with reality. Cage pieces it together in a way we don’t seem to understand, which makes us wonder if he really solved anything at all, or is just leaving us to believe that somehow the film has such a confusing conclusion to the madness, that an everyday audience wouldn’t be able to understand easily. Then, maybe we’re just supposed to accept that theory and pretend that this movie is very intelligent, with a mind-bending craft even Einstein couldn’t comprehend in two-hundred years. The film is such a disastrous jigsaw puzzle that seems to lead us in a direction where we can finally say “OK, I get it now”, but then it totally dismantles it all, creating more lies and scandals for us to realize, until we are sucked into the ruthless truth of who is really truthful and an ally to Cage, and who is not. Seriously, Cage’s character seems more of a villain as well. One scene following the assassination pits him (AS A COP) telling his best friend (Sinise), who is the Secretary of Defense’s bodyguard to lie to the other agents and officers to prevent his deserved imprisonment. We think we understand that Sinise’s hormones detured him from being at his post with the Secretary of Defense by scoping out a red headed beauty queen, and then we are lured into the backdoors of plot working in which we might as well give up and surrender to its actual stupidity. It completely sets a point to make the audience disturbed with its constant character and story manipulations. By the time we are introduced to the actual “real” bad guy scenario, we don’t even care. So many people could actually guess who the villain(s) turned out to be. The ending is more of a relief than an actual ending. So many good performances, so many interesting techniques, but so little excitment and creativity, and no sense of reality. Snake Eyes is more of a blood bath mystery with no desire to entertain, but to rather convince its audience that it is more mature than any other plausible film to date. Don’t be shocked when you realize that the film ends after 100 minutes, and you realize that if there weren’t so many scandelous scenes and obscure plot tugs that rip you in the wrong direction the whole way through, the film could’ve ended with a beginning that delivers, and a simple ending in which we could easily understand.
QUOTE: “Snake Eyes is a maze of annoyance, and simply that. It tries to be smarter than the audience, with emphasis on TRIES. The manuevers it plays with don’t entertain, but simply create more plot problems than thought possible. This film is like a “snake”, slithering in so many directions that we can’t keep up with its abnormality and constant shifts of the underminded. Maybe that was the original visualization from De Palma’s mind, but doesn’t it seem he might have explored the imagination a little bit much? My point is- if this would’ve been De Palma’s last film, would he have been proud of it, or ashamed? I think the answer is obvious.”
Rating: 1 / 5
December 19th, 2009 at 4:58 am
In 1960, America was imbued with a we-can-do-anything humanistic spirit of its new President, John F. Kennnedy, America was prosperous materially, but uneasy that it was not as strong as it once was in WWII to meet the threat of global communism. Certainly this film is “Dead Poets Society” afloat before it sinks, and this is the critical difference. Director Ridley Scott makes you wonder if he’s using films to work out his own internal struggles in his head, and reality rescues him here because the events are based on a true story, so if Scott doesn’t get the message, he at least depicts it and its then up to us to get it.
Something marvelous happens even though its terrible–that delivers the message, and that is the white squall storm that sinks the ship and kills several people you don’t want to see die. This is what sets this film apart from make-believe scenarios like Dead Poets, because those folks are never in DANGER. These folks put their idealism to the test of the real world, requiring REAL courage. The angst of never-having-fully-lived by America’s pampered in Poets smacks of trite self-indulgence, in this movie this Kennedy-era idealism runs smack into reality. President Teddy Roosevelt warned us as we grew pampered and at ease from industrial-age labor saving devices that we would stuill have to challenge ourseles physically, so he insured the natural state of the american west was conserved for us to explore. In this film, the sailing ship is a similar “retro-challenge” to build character, complete with a young idealistic character from the TV show “Party of Five” who looks like a young Kennedy in a sailing ship in several scenes. By teaching the boys to respect the sea and the ship, they will learn to respect each other.
The trouble with Camelot–is its self-indulgent idealism, not practical idealism, so the efforts of the boys to become men are spent on a flight of fancy in a dangerous sailing ship when we have much more sea-worthy vessels available and meaningful tasks to do, not just tasks required as Jeff Bridges’ skipper warns from the beginning are required to “keep the ship together”. The conflict in the film is the conflict of materialistic, pampered America to produce sturdy men who can face the storms of real life; the parents in the film sense this and are torn between safety and the need to take reasonable risks, and the boys themselves think there has to be “a better way”. The point of the film is NOT to “throw caution into the wind” counting on humanistic hubris but to take every precaution possible so you can set sail by the “wind”–a metaphor for life’s forces–and live to see another day.
But along the way, there are warnings that all is not well. Offshore near Cuba, a communist gunboat shoots across the ship’s bow and boards the boat. Bridges stands up to the commie and sends him on his way, though his compass is smashed and he must use his humanistic skills to pilot the ship…while over the horizon the ships of the ill-fated “Bay of Pigs” amphibious invasion appear….a foreshadowing of another “Camelot” type enterprise ready to hit a wall of harsh reality..days later as America is sending its first astronaut into space heard over the radio, the weather worsens…
Now that the boys who are now more mature, young men, most would expect a return home in a happy ending, but the storm hits and they lose the ship and some very fine people. Then in typical American fashion, we hold a court-room trial or a hearing to pin the blame on a “scapegoat” rather than face the truth that its our own mentality that is at fault. That scapegoat is the Skipper and his judgments when it should be the soundness of the entire sailing-ship-as-retro-character-builder-for-teenage-boys-in-an-unforgiving-environment-of-the-sea. Full grown MEN die at sea in much larger, more seaworthy vessels. A similar tragic ending took place later by unrealistically wishing 7-year old Jessica Dubroff to pilot an airplane across the U.S. Even with the best humanism, the skipper loses the ship and his lovely wife, several staff and boys to the sea. He is devastated. Is his idealism destroyed for good? Jeff Bridges in the courtroom says that control and the ship “got away from him” and “he didn’t see it coming”—–humanistic hubris will do that to you. This is exactly what took place with JFK and his Camelot humanism (phrase coined by his wife Jackie, afterwards): it ran head first into failures caused by unrealistic planning/preparations at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis and the conspiracy of gunmen at Dealey Plaza. It continued with RFK throwing “caution into the wind” and not having adequate security in place before he too, was gunned down.
The surviving boys rally to the Skipper’s side in the end, reminding him that in life we have to band together during the hour of crisis, that sometimes in life you have to “take your lumps” and “drive on”. The film suggests this fatalism should be accepted, I disagree. We should accept that its a possibility that the elements might get the better of us, but to do EVERYTHING IN OUR MEANS TO DEFEAT them, to include—but not over-depend on—human skill and have the HUMILITY to also use technology to help overcome the elements. That’s what men do if we are going to make headway in this dangerous, challenging world we live in eloquently told by the Party of Five actor at film’s end, and foretold earlier by Alan Shepherd’s space capsule spotted by the boys in their lifeboats. But that’s not what happens in America, lately every time we “fall off a horse”, we “wash our hands of it” in a senate hearing or a courtroom (Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia…) and then vow to never “get back on”, LEARNING HOW TO DO IT BETTER—Not more humanistic hubris but PHYSICAL means; life jackets, more bouyant sailing ships, better self-righting life boats, navigation/weather aids, recovery parachutes to prevent Jessica Dubroff-type aircraft crashes etc., This propensity to “throw the towel in” is how we drift from a nation of doers to a nation of talkers and computer game players. Jeff Bridges and his crew were trying to “pass the torch” of direct engagement of reality with high ideals, that he continued on to be one of the first Peace Corps Directors and the boys went to Vietnam and survived is testimony that their character didn’t fail.
The director of the film seems confused about whether the message should be to accept idealism with fatalism or if idealism is non-functional in the world; the real message is to make idealism functional.
Rating: 5 / 5