SNAKE EYES (1998: Dir. Brian De Palma)
The Nineties was an era of extremes for director Brian De Palma. It began with The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), a bloated social comedy that was his most expensive and public failure. He recovered with the mild success of Raising Cain (1992), a return to his earlier psychological chillers, but his career stumbled again with the disappointing box office of his Hispanic gangster tragedy Carlito's Way (1993). Cannily, he then accepted Tom Cruise's offer to direct Mission Impossible (1996), and as a result of his skillful cinematic storytelling, combined with a clever tongue-in-cheek script by David Koepp, De Palma achieved the biggest success of his career. With a genuine hit in his back pocket, De Palma re-teamed with Koepp, co-writing the film Snake Eyes, a Rashomon-type thriller that once again exploited prevalent societal fears in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on The World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombings. As with Blow Out, De Palma returned to the Kennedy assassination template, this time staging it in a confined indoor arena, while at the same time exploiting the crime-solving advances of modern video technology. A marvel for 9/11 conspiracy buffs, the film's postulations of a conspiracy between Arab assassins, military weapons contractors and the U.S. Defense Department were startling in their prescience, but the suspenseful scenario was really just a hook to hang a tour-de-force display of visual legerdemain. With stylish cinematography by frequent collaborator Stephen H. Burum (Body Double, The Untouchables), De Palma plays a paranoid game of three card monte, as bent Atlantic City cop Nicholas Cage finds himself confronting the limits of his own moral corruptibility in a sea of murder, betrayal and treason. It's a cracking nail-biter, that was probably undone by the advanced screening process when De Palma was coerced into substituting his bravura tidal wave climax for a far more realistic police stand-off. The lacklustre response to the film would end the decade on down note for De Palma, placing his career in a holding pattern outside the Hollywood System, where this maverick filmmaker regrettably remains to this day. DVD & BLU-RAY
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