Brian De Palma: Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes is, in a bizarre way, the logical continuation of Brian De Palma's previous film, Mission Impossible. Mixing political thriller with questionable plays for De Palma's capacity to capture Romantic grief, Snake Eyes likewise feels like a safe bet for the director, but one he that allows him to push his luck. If it's one of the emptiest films of De Palma's corpus—a collection of work that houses more than a few technical exercises—at least the director gives us a story so ridiculous you almost don't mind when it collapses in the third act.

In a long career of intricate, arresting openings, the start of De Palma's Snake Eyes may be his finest. A 13-minute tracking shot that moves through the grimy politics behind a heavyweight championship fight, the opening moves from camera monitors through police corruption and finally ends with an assassination. I would couch that in a spoiler warning, but I want to avoid repetition and thus see no need to mention that this is a Brian De Palma movie a second time. It's the start of a shallow but merry and hysterically over-intricate journey into late-Clinton America, a time of economic success and almost-grating peace, of a country so well off it's now darkly quaint to think how badly everyone wanted something interesting to happen.

That opening shot serves not only to introduce principal players—chiefly crooked cop Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) and his best friend, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise)—but to serve as a smorgasbord of De Palma's pet themes and tricks. The initial focus on pre-newscast prep and pullback to a row of monitors starts the film with surveillance, while Rick's tour through the arena's underbelly, placing bets for the fight and chasing down hoods (Luis Guzman) who hang out with the defending champ, shows off corruption and the way some cops fit into the criminal underworld a little too well. De Palma's Steadicam careens around corners, tilts with anticipation, and when the action moves to the floor of the arena for the big match, De Palma uses the frenzy of the crowd (and a ludicrously oversized and ironic American flag) to instantly plunge into sensory overload. You're left waiting for something terrible to happen, a feeling made worse by De Palma strictly tethering the movement to Rick, always pivoting to look at suspicious people around him and Kevin sitting by the visiting Defense Secretary before returning to an oblivious and ostentatious Rick. At the height of the match, shots ring out, and Rick turns to see the Defense Secretary dying, the only clues amidst the pandemonium the previously established glimpses at surrounding characters. As is so often the case with De Palma, the style slowly reveals the substance.

It's a shame the rest of the film doesn't live up to this bravura opening, a perfectly timed escalation of comic overacting, art-for-art's-sake stylistic flourishes and gripping tension that introduces multiple stories and red herrings from the start. Once Rick, with his gaudy leather-brown jacket and leopard-color Hawaiian shirt, starts digging into a case that runs far deeper than he could ever comprehend, it soon becomes evident that he's too indifferent to justice and too invested in some of the suspects to pursue the truth with the conviction he displays.

Not that it isn't fun to watch Cage strut around yelling his head off at all those who cross him. In many ways, he's the ideal Hollywood star for a De Palma film, capable of powerhouse performances when matched with the right material but incapable of subtlety at all times. Cage is a bundle of wild eyes, a manic grin, and a base volume so high one would be forgiven for assuming Cage imagined himself in some strange variant of Speed where he couldn't drop beneath 55 decibels. The only time he looks in his element is when stands up in his front-row seat and declares himself king as the crowd roars. That is the single moment of the film Cage is sufficiently in his element; the rest of the time, the action takes place on Earth, a place Cage infrequently dwells.

Made to chase down various leads, Rick slowly uncovers a vast conspiracy that does not border on comical so much as merrily squeak a clown nose as it rides over the line on a unicycle. De Palma announces the twist early on, even framing it in blatant visual terms: red light bathes the double-crosser as the camera goes Dutch, and ominous music sets in because you can never have too many clues in a De Palma film. Taking a page from their work on Mission: Impossible, De Palma and writer David Koepp set their sights on a wounded military-industrial complex reacting to the end of the Cold War gravy train with pent-up masculine capitalist aggression. This curious, amusing mash-up of jingoistic greed and psychosexual feelings of impotence in the military machine when it cannot flex its muscles to impress people is grounds for merciless De Palma satire, but the director never truly explored the idea in either of these films.

But if Snake Eyes sacrifices potential depth of comedy (to say nothing of humanity), it at least proves a fun diversion that lets De Palma dance around coquettishly. He and Cage understand each other to the point that the two nearly ring tragedy out of the absurdity of the double-cross and Rick's steadfast refusal to accept it (to those always on-guard for De Palma's purported misogyny, the fact that he blames a woman to her face for the transgressions of a man edges uncomfortably into an abstract, allegorical form of slut-shaming, with money swapped out for sex). Sinise plays Dunne like Lieutenant Dan with more self-control but all of the frothing hatred roiling underneath; to hold back that tension, Sinise clenches his jaw, and it's entirely conceivable he turned in this performance after having his mouth wired shut from some kind of accident. His hissed lines make a jolly counterpoint to Cage's toothy yells. Carla Gugino steals the show as the mysterious woman whose role remains ambiguous for a chunk of the film as she alternates between the femme fatale, the brilliant professional and the damsel. Gugino handles these shifts so fluidly she emerges perhaps too talented a chameleon for the sort of person her character really is, but it's a delight watching her melt through various female types while not letting herself be defined by any of them.

But not even Gugino is as interesting as De Palma's camerawork. Though the film lacks the aesthetic or political bite to place it among the director's finer works, Snake Eyes boasts a few setpieces that display the best (and most gloriously tacky) of De Palma. Besides the stupendous short-film career-summary of the opening shot, De Palma outdoes himself with a drift over hotel rooms as evil forces close in on Cage and Gugino. With a camera pointed straight down, De Palma moves over gauche tableaux of Atlantic City oblivion, scanning over garishly colored rooms filled with reveling frat boys, lonely gamblers, gratified johns, even a businessman or two who clearly imagined themselves enjoying the kind of night we see in the other neon-smeared suites clinging to the '80s by the fake fingernails. As with the first shot, it's silly, tasteless, and oh so brilliant.

Sucker Punch

Zack Synder's latest tribute to slow motion, Sucker Punch, tries so hard to be cool the director might as well have put sunglasses over the camera lens. Maybe he did, as that would explain why everything looked so dim. At times, I wondered if the movie was actually a minor step forward for 3D, one that did not require the use of special glasses. Of course, showing the film in 3D is the only way Sucker Punch could be any more offensive aesthetically: freed from the nominal requirement of honoring someone else's vision, Snyder can now assert his purported prowess to fully serve his own ends. But when you get closer, you find that his sandbox is filled with dried cat turds.

To be fair to the film, nothing that happens in it can or should be taken seriously. Its first moments open theatrical, revealing production and distribution company logos on curtains that rise to reveal a flat, clearly artificial set that only becomes a fully immersed location once the camera spins around the two-dimensional setup as if leaving drywall and furniture behind it to fill the space. This overt suggestion of the film's harmlessness graciously allows one to set aside issues of plausibility and, far more importantly, those of morality.

Following a brief, meaningless narration, the film starts with a wordless sequence set to an obnoxious cover of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." The near-10-minute setpiece depicts a young woman (Emily Browning) breaking down after the death of her mother. When her abusive father discovers the will left all his wife's money to the children, he plots to kill them both. He succeeds in killing his youngest, but the protagonist fends him off, until he frames her and has her committed to an institution, that is.

This opening allows Snyder to engage in his usual tropes: the entire sequence is slow-motion, filmed in muted, sharp grays and drowned out by exceedingly poor soundtrack selection. Whatever emotional connection a wordless depiction of grief and intolerable cruelty might have arisen from the judicious eye of a competent director gets swapped for emotional shorthand and Snyder's usual reveling in the misery and rage of others. There is no reason to care for Baby Doll, as she will come to be called in the institution, other than out of basic human decency, but for all the crap Snyder has crammed into his four live-action feature films, decency has never found its way into the mix.

Perhaps Snyder thought he was fooling anyone in his setup to the eventual descent into fancy and action one saw in the trailer, and I would have to say he was right, taking into account the dumbfounded reactions of those who could not follow the obvious giveaways 10 minutes into the film pointing to why the film suddenly lurches into a nonstop fantasy sequence. After a brief stay in the rusted metal and grimy concrete of the mental institution, the setting suddenly gives way to an old-school cabaret/strip club where all the orderlies and doctors from the preceding scenes appear as pimps and dance instructors. One woman in the audience lost volume control in her bewilderment and nearly screamed "What's happening?!" to her companions.

From there, the film moves into a series of fantastical, video-game like scenarios involving Baby Doll and the other girls of the institution/brothel: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens, looking suspiciously like Snooki). Synder's films have always incorporated a video-game cutscene aesthetic, but here he goes hog wild. Made to find a series of items straight out of an adventure quest by a mysterious sage (Scott Glenn in full on David Carradine from Kung Fu and Kill Bill mode), Baby Doll et al. traverse various setpieces that might have made for a diverse blend of action, had everything not felt so rote.

Seriously, how can a sequence built around skydiving from a WWII airplane into a Helm's Deep-esque stronghold being overrun by orcs in order to slay a dragon to steal its fire be so damn dull? In transposing their 7th-grade notebook sketches into a script, Snyder and co-writer Steve Shibuya never ground the action in anything. Glenn's character pops up at times to deliver wretched inspirational adages, but he might have turned to face the camera to remind Snyder of the importance of heart: Sucker Punch has none, and thus the frenzy of its quotation exists solely to advance the director's masturbatory tendencies. The film is not even rhythmic enough to suck the audience into the flow, and as we all know, it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing. Right, Scott?

Having disagreed with Rango's detractors over its use of cinematic references as supposedly empty and self-serving, I can now sit back and relax as Sucker Punch attracts all that ire. Snyder's film encompasses references from various fields: fantasy literature, steampunk, anime, video games and, surprisingly, musicals (the influence of Moulin Rouge! can be seen all over the place). But nothing is ever made unique, despite the lack of clear, obvious reference in scenes. He does not quote the lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or restage Lord of the Rings, but each reference only serves to show how much Snyder loves what he incorporates. Not even the mashup of styles in each setpiece -- such as a Great Train Robbery involving a bomb defusion and a robot army -- creates a feeling of originality in juxtaposition.

This is a movie that goes off half-cocked, both in the rush of its action sequences and the orgasmic fetishism freely on display. None of these scenes has any kind of internal logic or cleverness: it assumes that the sight of Nazi steampunk zombies is so cool that the jumbled assembly of the sequence does not matter*. Like any self-absorbed man, Snyder only holds onto these images long enough to blow his wad, at which point he stops caring. Each sequence begins and ends with its establishing shot, a cornucopia of stitched-together genre imagery whose prettiness is instantly subsumed in the garish gloss of the director's staging. And if I saw the women drop from the sky, land thunderously and look up triumphantly and seductively into the camera one more time I swear I'd kill someone. Thankfully, Sucker Punch avoids the offensiveness of Snyder's Watchmen and 300, which makes the aesthetic offensiveness of its conception all the more deeply felt.

Tarantino's name has floated around nearly every review of Sucker Punch, both for the amount of cinematic references and its use of bad-ass women characters. But Tarantino is steeped in trash, as familiar with the specifics of an Australian grindhouse picture as he is with the ideas behind Taxi Driver. Snyder is a product not of the VCR generation but of the YouTube one, aware only of surface-level visuals and lines. Tarantino memorized the names of everyone involved in his favorite movies; Snyder can just check IMDb. Even when he almost stumbles into something so audacious it could work, such as the WWI zombie sequence, he ruins it by unimaginatively filming it in the rapid-cutting shaky cam of modern war cinema -- though I suppose I should be grateful he laid off the damn slo-mo for 10 minutes.

For all the flat banality of the action, the worst aspect of the film is its fleeting sense of self-importance. Dialogue comes in three flavors: 1) bad-ass declarations, 2) inspiration faux-philosophy and 3) laughable moments of ostensibly emotional bonding. As much as Snyder clearly wants to just play with his toys, he would also like to continue trading on the undeserved reputation he got among some for making smart genre cinema when he broadly dumbed down Alan Moore's characterizations and philosophy with Watchmen. As if it did not already sag enough when fully embracing its insanity, Sucker Punch dips into new lows when it makes fitful stabs at meaning. It drains the life out of the cast, some of whom might have excelled in better circumstances.

When I heard the wonderful, electric Jena Malone would be in this film and receive more lines than she ever has in a mainstream movie, I could hardly contain my delight. But that gift is a curse: given more lines than anyone else, she must therefore bear the burden of that atrocious dialogue, and not even her indefatigable spunk can overcome the swill of Snyder's pastiche vomit. Malone and Cornish do their best to enliven the film, but saddled with three unresponsive co-stars and the sheer mega-tonnage of the film's smeared gloss, they too often feel as if their respective defiance and resignation is in response to the movie itself and not anything in its diegesis.

Perhaps Sucker Punch signals a roundabout step forward for women in film, in that it saddles a female cast with all the tired dialogue and phallic violence enjoyed by men since time eternal. But that smacks of the argument that Sarah Palin's political success is good for women despite her platform of policies almost entirely antithetical to gender advancement. Still, to compare the two would suggest that Sucker Punch is anything other than a transparently forgettable and a benign waste of time. I cannot bring myself, especially as a man, to hem and haw over whether Snyder's film is empowering or yet another example of his ability to capture the pain and despair of women without the depth that makes such depictions resonant. I can say, however, that if women got more opportunities to carry a big-budget CGI fest, even a shitty one, we might not have to spend so much time arguing over whether this one does them a disservice.