Brian De Palma recently turned 85, but even when he was younger, even when he was briefly a go-to buy for making big-budget, big-star studio thrillers, the man had a retro sensibility. This doesn’t mean his movies feel old-fashioned, necessarily, but his heavy debt to Hitchcock, whose own work was starting to feel substantially less cutting-edge when De Palma first got into motion pictures, means that even his most style-forward movies (and many of them are extremely stylish and extremely forward) throw back to the work that most influenced him as a so-called “movie brat.”
So it’s a little unusual to see an old De Palma movie (albeit one some of us older folks might still think of as one of his newer ones!) as the target of very au courant conspiracy theorizing. Yes, people are asking questions about Snake Eyes, where Nicolas Cage plays a sleazy, crooked cop investigating an assassination that takes place a boxing match in Atlantic City. Without getting too far into the social-media weeds, suffice to say the movie features the assassination of a character named … Charles Kirkland. (No, not Charlie Kirk, nor even Charlie Kirkland, but Charles Kirkland.)
As far as acts of prescience go, it’s not especially impressive. There are movies out there that have more broadly “predicted” bigger social concepts. Hell, just looking at the summer of 1998, when Snake Eyes first hit theaters, you can see movies that anticipate banal surveillance-flavored reality TV (The Truman Show), sliding into DMs (You’ve Got Mail), and the use of terrorism to persecute citizens (The Siege). By comparison, a movie featuring assassination seems pretty tame, even if it includes some extremely basic yet eerie similarities.
The weird irony is, anyone taking a peak at Snake Eyes — it’s currently streaming on Paramount+ — for its assassination material will also be checking out the best part of the movie. De Palma opens the film with a bravura 13-minute unbroken taken following Cage’s character around the arena, introducing the setting, characters, and Cage’s go-for-broke style all in one terrific stunt. It’s career-best work from De Palma, appended to, well, not exactly career-worst work in the remaining 80 minutes, but a thriller that quickly falls from top-tier to solid, eventually maybe a little disappointing.
It’s not an uncommon problem in De Palma’s output of this post-Mission: Impossible period. With Carlito’s Way in 1993 and the original Mission in 1996, De Palma had made two of the best mainstream studio pictures of his career (and in Mission, his biggest hit). In fact, in the documentary De Palma, he says that he isn’t sure he can make a movie better than Carlito’s Way. (I’d say: Well, maybe Carrie.) Snake Eyes kicked off a period where his movies worked more in fits and starts. Snake Eyes, Mission to Mars, and The Black Dahlia all have dynamite sequences that make them worth watching, but they all kinda fly off the rails at some point, without the discipline of Carlito’s Way or the Full De Palma madness of Body Double or Raising Cain.
Still, part of loving De Palma is learning to happily extract the great stuff from his more uneven pictures, and just roll with the bad. Assuming that Snake Eyes somehow predicted the murder of Charlie Kirk (who was, of course, not the Secretary of Defense, nor a government official at all, nor attending a boxing match) is a weird and kind of creepy way to learn that lesson, but those first 13 minutes… actually, make it the full first half-hour… really are great. For conspiracy nuts, I don’t know, it seems pretty boilerplate. I’d recommend they look instead to Mission to Mars, which has some wild theories about humans evolving from Martians, and still has plenty of Gary Sinise.
Snake Eyes is currently available to stream on Paramount+, as well as a number of VOD outlets.
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Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream Snake Eyes on Paramount+