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80Snake Eyes can't sustain its masterful first hour, but it's better than just about any action movie this year.
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80The entire film takes its cue from Cage's spritzes and jags; it's a delirious performance in a delirious landscape.
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78After it has ended, you may want to view it all over again, just to see if you can beat the odds and pick up on what you missed the first time around.
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75The real heroes are cinematographer Stephen H. Burum and editor Bill Pankow, who help the picture keep popping even when its plot and dialogue go into a slump.
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75Snake Eyes sports some of the most breathtaking filmmaking of De Palma's career -- and Nicolas Cage is the one actor who cannot be upstaged by it. [18 September 1998, p. 11E]
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70There's plenty of bravura camera work and two terrific supporting turns from Carla Gugino, as a terrified key witness, and Stan Shaw, as the soul-searching heavyweight champ. De Palma didn't hit the jackpot here, but he certainly didn't roll snake eyes.
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A dicey thriller visually, De Palma kicks off the movie on quite a roll, but the story craps out. [7 August 1998, p. 57]
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63Mixed together, all of this makes for a fascinating viewing experience, but the unfortunate ending diluted my enthusiasm for the film as a whole.
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63Great pictures are seamless; in this one, you can not only see the seams but count the stitches.
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60Cage and Sinise earn their pay, but the story by De Palma and David Koepp -- which strains for romantic glory of De Palma's "Blow Out" or "Obsession" -- gives away too much too early.
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60A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.
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60A thriller of serpentine excitement all the way up to that dud of a climax.
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In spite of its noirish glow, De Palma's thriller is oddly unsuspenseful. Although his vaunted technique and Hitchcockian effects are all here, there's no life in the story (co-written by De Palma and David Koepp), and the last-minute burst of sentimentality is especially lame.
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50The movie's coda is completely ridiculous and, worse yet, boring.
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I can't think of another movie that starts so brilliantly and ends so miserably as this one.
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50Cage supplies beaucoup energy, but his highly compromised hustler cop character provides little else in which he can invest his talent. Sinise wears an increasingly grim demeanor in a part that comes to make no sense, and John Heard's role as a local power broker gets lost in the shuffle.
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50For me, part of the fun of Snake Eyes is the genuine satisfaction of seeing Brian De Palma finally arriving at his own level.
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40The identity of the bad guy is ludicrously obvious; and his public unmasking relies on the dopiest contrivance in recent memory.
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40Not too long after the knockout opening, all that's left of Snake Eyes are Cage's wild eyes, the dregs of David Koepp's rotten script, and De Palma's restless, anxious camera, on the prowl for something, anything, to hang on to.
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40As filmmaking, it's a bravura performance, but as a film, it falls flat.
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30A glittery but dunderheaded murder mystery.
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25It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
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25De Palma seems to be trying too hard to make somebody else's great movie, once again an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Would someone please tell this guy to relax?
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25Has Brian De Palma finally lost his mind? Ever since "Carrie" (1976), his one true masterpiece, this director has evolved into a cinematic serial killer of common sense.