Snake Eyes (M)

Reviewed by RUSSELL BAILLIE

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Gary Sinise
Director: Brian De Palma

He's always been a show-off, has De Palma, the king of the directorial flourish. The man constantly needs to show off just how well he studied his cinema history -- whether it's stealing wholesale from Hitchcock or tossing in references to ancient but important flicks that all we mere mortals should have seen.

And he's been a show-off of another sort, too -- one who often treats his women characters as cleavages on legs. You sometimes get the feeling that if he hadn't been a director of forgettable films -- or mediocre films with unforgettable moments -- he would have made quite a pornographer.

In Snake Eyes, a political-assassination thriller set against a seedy casino-and-boxing world, De Palma finds a lot to show off with.

And he's got help in the form of Cage. As Rick Santoro, a bent Atlantic City cop, Cage resurrects his wild-eyed man-on-the-verge act, which has been the undoing of many a movie.

Santoro is ringside on a fight night when a politician in the row behind takes a bullet. His friend, navy man Kevin Dunne, is the head of the offed chap's security detail and is guilt-stricken by his negligence, even though he shot the gunman.

But, of course, it's not as simple as that. The boxing arena and casino go into lock-down mode to sift through a potential 14,000 witnesses, Santoro finds some funny goings-on in the videotape of the evening, and there is the case of the woman in the blond wig (cleavage number one, and oh so Vertigo) who was trying to pass the politician some documents just as he was shot, and is now trying to find a safe place to hide and wash the blood off her frock.

If you haven't figured out what's really going on by the time it's revealed about half-way through, you'll probably enjoy it a lot more.

Some might be impressed by De Palma's flourishes, like the seemingly seamless opening 20-minute steadicam shot which Cage uses to chew up the scenery and render his character instantly loathsome.

Then there's a sweeping shot through a ceiling-eyed view of a row of hotel rooms showing what the various inhabitants are getting up to. Or the flashbacks of the different perspectives (oh, very Rashomon) on the crime.

Yes, but none of these particularly add anything, except to further overbake a film already suffering the attentions of a volcanic soundtrack.

But what this thriller really lacks is thrills, or even a sense of tension to its various double-crosses, moral dilemmas and cat-and-mouse chases.

And no amount of shouting by Cage will distract from the plot holes and unlikelihoods, all capped off by a daftly disappointing ending.

So a flamboyant, flawed effort in which De Palma proves he's a show-off, and a terrible show-off at that. * *
-- Weekend TimeOut, 28/11/98