Red Rock West

Direct-to-video no longer has the stigma it once did. Back in the heyday of home video for a film to bypass a theatrical release and go straight to video was reserved for the likes of cheesy erotic thrillers and B-movies starring washed-up actors. Like time, stigma is a funny thing. The scarlet letters of yesteryear are a distant memory due in large part to streaming services like Amazon and Netflix, which have begun to change this perception by releasing high profile movies like Bird Box (2018) on home video as opposed to giving them a wide theatrical release.

Back in 1993, however, Red Rock West (1993), a modest neo-noir starring Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper and Lara Flynn Boyle, was unjustly sold to cable television when it wasn’t considered easily marketable by the studio that owned it. Fortunately, it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival where a San Francisco-based theater owner rescued it from obscurity. While it still didn’t make back its modest budget at least it was given a second chance before being relegated to home video.

Michael (Cage) is a down-on-his-luck war veteran living out of his car and looking for work. A knee injury rules him out of jobs such as an oil drilling gig he shows up for in Wyoming. We learn some important things about him in this opening scene. He’s honest. He could’ve lied on his application about his injury but didn’t. He has integrity. After failing to get the job his buddy told him about he offers Michael a few bucks to which he refuses, telling him, “Don’t worry about me.” This scene is important as it establishes what kind of a person he is – he’ll make his own through life. This is especially crucial later on when we begin wondering who we can trust.

Michael soon finds himself in the sleep little town of Red Rock, arriving like a gunslinger when he goes into a bar looking for leads on any work in the area. Wayne (J.T. Walsh), the owner, mistakes him for a hitman from Dallas he hired to kill his wife Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle). Michael goes along with the ruse long enough to take half the money, warn the wife, take her money to kill Wayne, and skip out of town, letting this clearly dysfunctional couple settle their own issues. Of course, this being a noir story it is never that simple and Michael runs into the real hitman, Lyle from Dallas (Dennis Hopper), and finds it increasingly difficult to get out of Red Rock. Part of the fun of watching Red Rock West is seeing poor Michael get deeper and deeper in trouble as his attempts to leave town are thwarted.

Coming off the modest hit that was Honeymoon in Vegas (1992), Nicolas Cage brought an affable everyman quality to Michael as he tones down his trademark Cageisms, which may explain why it isn’t one of his more celebrated performances. Some might consider this to be one of the actor’s tamer performances but so what? You can’t have crazy all the time as that too becomes predictable and stale. I like that Cage plays Michael as a reluctant protagonist that seems to always make the wrong decisions. There are scenes where we see Michael weighing his options over in his mind or berating himself after a particular one goes badly.

Hot off her role as good-girl-next-door Donna in Twin Peaks, Lara Flynn Boyle plays a duplicitous femme fatale. With her flinty gaze and emotionless demeanor, Suzanne is clearly not to be trusted but for some foolish reason (perhaps sex with her clouded his judgment), Michael does and this unnecessarily complicates his life. With the exception of the first season of Twin Peaks, I’ve found Boyle to have a cold presence, which may explain why her most believable role is as an alien in Men in Black II (2002). Dahl finds a way to use her iciness to effect as a scheming woman that manipulates Michael to do her bidding.

When Dennis Hopper shows up he gives the film a jolt of unpredictable energy as Lyle from Dallas, the real hitman. He’s a genial, good ol’ boy until he has to do his job and then Hopper brings his trademark scary intensity that we all know and love. The great J.T. Walsh plays the tightly wound bar owner/sheriff of the town that also harbors a secret. The role doesn’t require the actor to show much range but it does allow him to do what he does best – play an uptight authority figure that makes the protagonist’s life hell.

The first two thirds of Red Rock West is a slow burn as director John Dahl establishes all the characters and their relationships to one another. The last third is particularly enjoyable as we get too see the likes of Cage, Hopper and Walsh share the screen together as they head towards an inevitable confrontation.

Director John Dahl establishes an atmospheric tone right from the opening shot of an empty highway out in the middle of nowhere with ominous storm clouds overhead foreshadowing trouble. The opening credits play over a sunny version of this desolate stretch of road as we see Michael get ready for his job interview and it gives us some crucial insight into his character in economical fashion with no dialogue, instead conveyed visually. With its wide open vistas and twangy, country music-esque score, complete with frontier-type town, Red Rock West feels like a modern western fused with a neo-noir.

In 1992, Red Rock West was made in Arizona on a $7.5 million budget, financed with a negative pick-up deal selling off the cable T.V., video and overseas rights with Columbia TriStar Home Video covering $3.5 million of the production costs. They made a deal with HBO to recoup some of their money.

The film didn’t test well with audiences and fell between the cracks as it wasn’t deemed commercial enough for a strong advertising campaign or artistic enough to go out on the film festival circuit. As a result, there was little incentive for someone to buy the theatrical rights. This didn’t stop Red Rock West from opening well in Europe in 1993, which caught the attention of Piers Handling, director of the Toronto International Film Festival. He decided to show it at the festival that year.

It was well received, but none of the usual art house movie distributors were interested despite the pedigree of the cast and it aired several times on HBO. Bill Banning, owner of the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, saw it at the film festival and wanted to book the film and couldn’t believe it didn’t have a distributor. It wasn’t until January 1994 that he was able to find out who owned the rights. Once it began screening at the Roxie it broke the house record in its fourth week due in large part to positive reviews in the local press and strong word-of-mouth.

Red Rock West received strong critical notices. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “It’s the kind of movie made by people who love movies, have had some good times at them, and want to celebrate the very texture of old genres like the western and the film noir.” The New York Times’ Caryn James wrote, “The director and co-writer, John Dahl, keeps up this perfect swift timing throughout the film, playfully loading on every suspense-genre trick he can imagine. Red Rock West is a terrifically enjoyable, smartly acted, over-the-top thriller.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Cage’s naturalness as a nice guy in a big jam lends the film considerable substance while Hopper’s wily foil, Boyle’s tough dame and Walsh’s minor-league baddie provide much amusement.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman described it as “a tongue-in-cheek film noir gothic…a likably scruffy knockoff of the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple.”

While Red Rock West doesn’t have the acclaim of The Last Seduction (1994) or the cult appeal of Rounders (1998), I still find it to be Dahl’s most engaging and entertaining film. It didn’t deserve its initial fate. Some films get all the breaks in the world, seemingly destined for greatness. Some films get no breaks and are forgotten. Some films take on a life of their own. Time erases stigmas. No one cares if a film was released direct-to-video. Truly good art survives. It can now show up on Amazon or Netflix, waiting for someone to discover it without any pre-conceived notions.

SOURCES

Bearden, Keith. “John Dahl.” MovieMaker. August 2, 1994.

Galbraith, Jane. “Following the Long, Strange Trip of Red Rock.” Los Angeles Times. April 8, 1994.

Hornaday, Ann. “Film Noir, ‘Tweener or Flub’?” The New York Times. April 3, 1994.

Mandy

El Topo (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Repo Man (1984). These iconic films are examples of “midnight movies” – cinema so outlandish and bizarre that they could only be viewed at midnight screenings, typically financial flops during their initial theatrical run only to be rediscovered later by a small but dedicated following that worships every scene, every bit of memorable dialogue. These films dealt with wild elements like drugs, rock 'n' roll, sex and violence in extreme ways so that the act of going to see them felt like a taboo smashing event in itself. The midnight movies aesthetic nearly became extinct thanks to the decline of art houses and repertory theatres and the popularity of home video and the Internet. Like the zombies in Romero’s Dead films, however, the midnight movie experience refused to die with films like Donnie Darko (2001) developing a cult following through late night screenings. Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018) continues this tradition.

The film rather fittingly received its theatrical debut at midnight. It is a throwback to the midnight movie aesthetic – imagine a Frank Frazetta illustration brought to life by some kind of cinematic alchemy courtesy of Alejandro Jodorowsky if he decided to direct a biker movie. This is the cinematic equivalent of a death metal record and feels like it should be watched with a black light on. Mandy returns us to the heady times when a film was experienced as opposed to merely being watched. It comes from the mind of Panos Cosmatos, son of journeyman Hollywood director George P. Cosmatos (responsible for action fare like Rambo: First Blood Part II and Cobra). Mandy is the follow-up to his auspicious debut Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), a hallucinatory mood piece that felt like early David Cronenberg on acid.

Cosmatos sets the tone right from the get-go with “Starless” by King Crimson playing over the opening credits while introducing Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) plying his trade as a logger. He returns home after a hard day’s work to his girlfriend Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), an artist who creates wonderfully detailed fantasy art. Cosmatos makes a simple scene like the couple talking in bed visually arresting by employing a series of constantly shifting color filters over them. The first half of the film is a love story between Red and Mandy as we hang out with them, observing the couple talking in bed and eating dinner in front of their television – things that most couples do. This gets us to care about and like them. It also shows how Red is defined by his relationship with Mandy. He works hard during the day cutting trees. He doesn’t enjoy it; he does it to support them. He is also supportive of her work as an illustrator, taking a genuine interest in her latest project.

Cosmatos’ film is permeated with a dreamy atmosphere where everyone talks slowly with pregnant pauses and utilizes long takes like something out of a David Lynch film. An ominous tone is gradually established throughout the first half of the film as there is the feeling that something horrible is going to happen. While out for a walk one day a truck emerges out of a hellish light and passes by her. One of the passengers is Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), leader of a hippie cult known as Children of the New Dawn. He notices and becomes immediately fixated on her. He enlists his people to kidnap Mandy and they in turn call upon the Black Skulls, a demonic biker gang from out of the woods in an unsettling scene where they are summoned with a mystical horn, emerging in the form the marauders from The Road Warrior (1981) if they mated with the Cenobites from Hellraiser (1987).

They kidnap Mandy in the middle of the night and subdue Red amidst strobing lights in a nightmarish scene. Once the cultists dose Mandy with LSD and the venom from a giant black wasp that apparently lives in mysterious thick fluid, Cosmatos cuts loose with the Giallo lighting and a trippy audio/visual assault on the senses. Sand and his people torture Red and force him to watch a gut-wrenching act that destroys his entire world. Of course, the cultists make the fatal flaw that bad guys always make in revenge movies – they let the hero live when they had the chance to kill him. Once free, Red makes it his sole mission in life to wreak unholy vengeance on Sand and his cult of Jesus freaks. From this point on Mandy becomes a full-throttle revenge picture referencing Enter the Dragon (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) as Red drops acid, snorts cocaine and lights a cigarette from the flaming skull of a biker on his bloody path of revenge.

Cosmatos understands that for a revenge story to work the antagonist must do evil things that affect the protagonist in a very personal way so that the vengeance that comes later on is not only satisfying for the hero but a cathartic experience for the audience. Over the course of the film, Red undergoes a harrowing transformation from loving everyman to home-made, axe-wielding golem whose breaking point comes during an impressively acted freak out by Nicolas Cage that rivals Martin Sheen hitting rock bottom at the beginning of Apocalypse Now (1979). There is something genuine about the primal anger and sadness that Cage emotes in this powerful scene.

These days when you watch a Nicolas Cage movie you know what you’re going to get. Long gone are the days where he’d attack every film role that came his way with unpredictable gusto. Since his last significant studio movie and his well-publicized financial problems he’s appeared in several forgettable movies. Every so often, however, he throws audiences a curveball, appearing in notable projects like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Drive Angry (2011) that allow him to channel his inner Cage and demonstrate that the desire to cut loose has not gone away; it merely lies dormant, anticipating the opportunity to let its freak flag fly. Mandy is such a film.

The character of Mandy is tied to the earth as evident in a scene where she grieves for a dead baby animal she encounters while out for a walk in the woods. While Red suggests leaving at some point, she disagrees, finding it peaceful out in the middle of nowhere. She also recounts a story about her father killing a baby starling with a crowbar and how he gave it to other kids so they could take a turn but when it came to her time she ran away. Andrea Riseborough does an excellent job in these scenes, giving insight into Mandy’s dark past and how she feels safe and happy with Red.

Linus Roache plays Jeremiah as a charismatic figure that destroys one man’s life for his own trivial fantasies. He is a cult leader with a messiah complex, spouting pseudo philosophical religious twaddle while the women in his cult serve and service him. He surrounds himself with people willing to do his bidding and is ultimately portrayed as a pathetic figure with delusions of grandeur that will be his undoing.

Hopefully, the buzz that Mandy has generated will get Cage out of cinema purgatory and back working with top tier talent on significant material instead of garbage like 211 (2018) and The Humanity Bureau (2018). He has always been something of a wild card, following his own internal muse for better or for worse. Mandy shows that he can still deliver the goods if given the right material. Hopefully, it will also allow Cosmatos to make another film in less time it took between this and Beyond the Black Rainbow. He wisely bided his time between projects until he hooked up with backers that were willing to give him the creative freedom he wanted. It has more than paid off – the end result is a confident and assured film with a bold, distinctive visual style and many unforgettable moments that make it a prime candidate for the midnight movie hall of fame.

Con Air

By all rights, Con Air (1997) should have been an awful waste of time – just another tired Jerry Bruckheimer testosterone action movie whose final fate should have been wedged between beer and pick-up truck ads on television. Instead, the movie cleverly sends up and celebrates nearly every action cliché in the genre. No expense is spared as Powers Boothe is enlisted to solemnly intone the virtues of the U.S. Rangers at the beginning of the movie and then has Trisha Yearwood sing a sappy love song (“How Do I Live”) over the protagonist reuniting with his wife.

U.S. Ranger Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is due to be paroled after killing a drunk who threatened him and his wife (Julia Roberts wannabe Monica Potter). We are subjected to the typical passage of time montage documenting Poe’s stint in prison as director Simon West and the screenplay by Scott Rosenberg slyly reference a similar sequence with Nicolas Cage in Raising Arizona (1987) and the prison riot scenes in Natural Born Killers (1994). No, really. The prologue clocks in at a speedy five minutes and change, economically setting up the premise. Then, the opening credits play over Poe in prison reading and writing letters to his daughter, employing every cliché in the book all with a thick as molasses Southern drawl.

Of course, Poe’s trip home isn’t going to be that easy as his knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time continues when the plane he’s on just happens to be transporting the worst criminal scum on the planet. Chief among them, Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom (John Malkovich), a serial rapist (Danny Trejo), a Black Panther-esque militant (Ving Rhames), a Hannibal Lector rip-off (Steve Buscemi), a young Dave Chappelle riffing his way through the movie as a minor criminal that incites the jailbreak, and a whole slew of mass murderers.

Naturally, the convicts get free of their restraints and take control of the plane. To make matters worse, Poe’s buddy (Mykelti Williamson) goes into insulin shock. On the ground, U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack) and DEA Agent Duncan Malloy (Colm Meaney) get into a heated debate about how exactly to deal with the runaway plane – Larkin wants to take it down through peaceful means while Malloy wants to shoot it out of the sky. Naturally, it’s up to Poe to do the right thing and save the day.

Clearly riffing on his psychotic assassin from In the Line of Fire (1993), albeit with a much better sense of humor, John Malkovich gets the lion’s share of the movie’s best dialogue and delivers it with his trademark scathing dry wit. He really seems to be having fun with this role. Along comes Steve Buscemi as a criminal with a revered and feared reputation and yet we never actually see him do anything to support these claims. He and Malkovich get locked into a competition to see who can deliver the best one-liner with the driest of deliveries.

Colm Meaney and John Cusack have a lot of fun bickering back and forth, as the former plays an assholish DEA agent, a typical blowhard authority figure, while the latter plays a cerebral U.S. Marshal – one of his trademark characters dropped into a slam-bang Bruckheimer action movie. Part of the fun of watching Cusack in Con Air is seeing him navigate the kind of movie he doesn’t usually do, butting heads with Bruckheimer stereotypes with often interesting results.

You have to hand it to Nicolas Cage; he certainly knows how to pick action movies that allow him to play ever so slightly left-of-center characters like The Rock (1996), where he played an anti-action hero, and Face/Off (1997), a stylish John Woo movie with an insane role reversal plot twist. In this movie, the actor looks ridiculous with his glorious mullet, taking his cue from Jean-Claude Van Damme’s similar ‘do in Hard Target (1993). With Con Air, Cage wisely plays Poe as if it were a straight-forward action movie, which is in sharp contrast to many of the larger than life characters around him. He’s gracious and smart enough to know that when everyone around him is playing larger than life characters, go the low-key route.

Getting his start in commercials, director Simon West wears his influences on his sleeve, doing his best Michael Bay impersonation as he employs oh-so dramatic slow-mo shots of badass characters walking towards the camera (a ‘90s staple – see Armageddon), our hero outrunning an explosion, and everything is gorgeously shot and edited within an inch of its life.

For a big, loud action movie, the dialogue is quite clever and, more importantly, delivered well by the cast – which, incidentally, is an incredible collection of movie stars and character actors. It is so jam-packed with talented thespians that you wonder how in the hell did the powers that be get them all to be in this movie? Con Air looks and sounds like a Bruckheimer action film but it is Rosenberg’s screenplay that is the wild card. It sets up the standard, implausible action movie premise and introduces the genre archetypes (i.e. the lone wolf protagonist with his pretty, loving wife and the criminal mastermind, etc.) and starts messing around with the formula.

Scott Rosenberg garnered a lot of buzz from his screenplay for Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (1995). Disney came calling and hired him to write a script. They gave him a Los Angeles Times article about a Federal Marshal program that transported inmates across the country. To research the operation, he went to Oklahoma City and spent three days on a plane with convicts. He observed, “hardened convicts at their worst. It was very unsettling, and a bit terrifying.” Rosenberg settled down to write the script, listening to a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers albums and came up with an idea about a guy sent to prison when his wife was pregnant and had never met his daughter. This freed up Rosenberg to populate the script with “the craziest motherfuckers; the most absurd dialogue and set-pieces.”

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer read Rosenberg’s script and bought it for his production company but felt that it needed to be more character-driven. He worked closely with Rosenberg to “add more dimension” to the characters and make it a story about redemption. Bruckheimer hired Simon West to direct because he had been impressed by his T.V. commercial work.

Upon completing The Rock with Nicolas Cage, Bruckheimer asked the actor to star in Con Air. With this movie, he wanted to return to a “more old-fashioned style of action movie,” and used Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952) as a point of reference, playing a character with good values. To prepare for the role, he visited Folsom State Prison where he had to sign a “no hostage” clause in order to walk among hardened inmates in the Level Four lock-up. Everything was fine until he, Bruckheimer, Rosenberg and West talked to one group of inmates in the yard and not another. All hell broke loose as one inmate tried to stab another.

Cage observed that many inmates had chiseled physiques and decided to take his cue from boxer Ken Norton and “look like I could survive anything, anywhere.” To this end, he adopted a specific diet, ran five miles a day and lifted weights frequently. At one point, the studio was worried that the actor was getting too ripped, which he found amusing: “I thought, ‘Now that’s a new one – too built-up for an action movie.’” In the script, Poe wasn’t too smart, “just a skeleton of a character,” according to Cage, and made him a Southern man that idolizes his wife. He also decided to make Poe an Army Ranger to explain how he could survive on a plane without a gun. Winning an Academy Award hadn’t mellowed out the actor as West remembered, “If we were doing an intense scene, he’d howl like a banshee and he’d leap around like a banshee, too. I’d give him a minute or two and then I’d say, ‘Let’s move on, Nick.”

Con Air received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the movie three out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is essentially a series of quick setups, brisk dialogue and elaborate action sequences…assembled by first-time director Simon West…it moves smoothly and with visual style and verbal wit.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Con Air has an important secret weapon: an indie cast. All of the principals normally work in films more interesting and human than this one, which gives Con Air a touch of the subversive and turns it into a big-budget lark.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Con Air may be the closest thing yet to pure action thriller pornography. Ultimately, there’s nothing to it but thrust.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “But with a noise level so high the dialogue has to be screamed and more silly moments than sane ones, Con Air is an animated comic book put together to pound an audience into submission, not entertain it.”

Con Air works because the filmmakers take a simple set-up and expertly execute it. The movie still plugs in the usual, over-the-top set pieces. For example, a sports car is towed behind a cargo plane only to crash through a control tower and explode. Our hero’s best buddy even gets to utter a stirring soliloquy as he lies gravely injured. True to form, the ending is highly implausible and excessive even by Bruckheimer standards but you have to admire the filmmakers for going for it. There is a fascinating push and pull going on with this movie as it trots out all the usual action movie clichés while often commenting on them ironically in true ‘90s fashion – so much so that at one point, Steve Buscemi’s spooky killer even acknowledges said irony. Ultimately, what redeems Con Air – well-placed sense of irony – is, sadly, what goes missing when its sappy ending rears its ugly head, even if it tries to evoke the ending of Wild at Heart (1990). No, really.

SOURCES

Con Air Production Notes. 1997.

Longsdorf, Amy. “Traditional Values Drew Iconoclastic Nicolas Cage To Do Con Air.” The Morning Call. June 1, 1997.

“Screenwriter Scott Rosenberg Interview.” Kid in the Front Row. March 13, 2010.

Snowden

At first glance, Edward Snowden’s life would make for an excellent political thriller. Here is someone who enlisted in the United States Army Reserve to fight in the Iraq War because he wanted to make a difference. When that didn’t pan out, he got a job in the CIA and distinguished himself thanks to his computer skills. From there, he worked for Dell and was soon assigned to the NSA. It was there that he became disillusioned with the global surveillance programs the U.S. government used in cooperation with telecommunications companies and European governments. He copied and then leaked classified information while hiding out in Hong Kong.

This kind of story would seem an ideal fit for a politically minded filmmaker like Oliver Stone who championed fiercely committed protagonists that buck the system in films like Salvador (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and JFK (1991). Since that unprecedented run of films in the 1980s and 1990s, the director has slowed down somewhat. Sure, there was the ambitious historical epic Alexander (2004), but also the surprisingly toothless W. (2008), and the ultimately disappointing Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010). With Snowden (2016), there was the hope among his fans that the material would reinvigorate Stone and mark a return to form.

The film begins in June 2013 when Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) in Hong Kong. They go to his hotel room where he tells them his life story for a documentary she’s filming and an article he’s writing. Stone proceeds to employ flashbacks to tell Snowden’s story.

Much like Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July, he joins the army out of a sense of duty and patriotism but a freak accident quickly derails his military career. Fortunately, Snowden has impressive computer skills and gets a job at the CIA where he becomes a different kind of soldier, armed with a P.C. He excels by demonstrating an uncanny ability to think outside the box, which impresses his instructor (Rhys Ifans).

The strongest scenes during his CIA training aren’t the actual training exercises but the quiet moments he has with senior analyst and teacher Hank Forrester (Nicolas Cage) as they bond over the latter’s collection of vintage encryption and code-breaking devices. Nicolas Cage plays the man as a wise mentor and exudes an easy-going charisma as he tells Snowden how things work. It was a smart move on Stone’s part to have a skilled actor like Cage deliver exposition dialogue in a way that is engrossing. His chemistry with Gordon-Levitt is so enjoyable to watch that I’d love to see a film with just Forrester and Snowden.

Stone attempts to humanize Snowden through his interactions with girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) in a meet-cute in Washington, D.C. as his conservative patriotism playfully clashes with her leftist ideals. Their initial scenes foreshadow Snowden’s political awakening. Fortunately, Stone keeps Mills throughout the film thereby making her a crucial part of Snowden’s life and preventing her character from being reduced to the stock girlfriend role. It doesn’t hurt that he cast a strong actress in the part with Shailene Woodley.

Stone shows how Snowden’s belief in the U.S. government is gradually eroded when he is shown surveillance programs that can search anyone’s private email, chats, and hijack the camera on someone’s laptop for anything and this disturbs him. It is all fascinating and frightening at the same time because of its insidious nature. Stone gradually ratchets up the tension as Snowden and the journalists try to figure out what to do with the massive amount of information he’s given them and the implications of it.

Not surprisingly, the most compelling scenes in Snowden are the ones with him holed up in his hotel room with the Poitras, Greenwald and Scottish journalist Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson) telling them what he knows. It is these scenes where Joseph Gordon-Levitt really excels by eerily channeling Snowden, right down to his distinctive voice and subtly mimicking his physical mannerisms.

Stone wisely doesn’t fall into the same trap as other films about computer hackers and try to portray what they do in a sexy, stylish way in order to keep our attention. Instead, he portrays it matter-of-factly as just another component of the film. Stylistically, Stone has left the full-throttled, multi-layered approach of films like JFK and Natural Born Killers (1994) behind long ago in favor of a more straightforward look with an emphasis on character and story. Unlike a lot of other films in the genre, Snowden not only puts a human face on it but also explores its moral and political implications in a thought-provoking way. Sadly, like Michael Mann’s Blackhat (2015), mainstream audiences weren’t interested in films about computer hacking no matter how compelling and Snowden failed to recoup its modest budget, which is a shame because his life is such a gripping story.

Snowden isn’t some fast-paced Jason Bourne spy movie. It is about a real person that decided to take an extreme risk to do what he thought was right. Like the protagonists in some of Stone’s other films, Snowden had to make a crucial decision that impacted the rest of his life but does it because he is compelled to do so through a strong sense of what he believes is right. Whether you agree or disagree with what he did, the film raises some troubling questions about our basic freedoms and rights in an age where we are under constant digital surveillance.

Snake Eyes

In the 1990s, filmmaker Brian De Palma struggled between making expensive, high profile failures like The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and pushing through personal projects like Raising Cain (1992) and commercial triumphs like Mission: Impossible (1996). Fresh from the success of the latter film, he rounded out the decade with conspiracy thriller Snake Eyes (1998) starring Nicolas Cage. De Palma employed his trademark stylistic bag of tricks to deliver a never dull thriller that was ultimately marred by a weak ending (infamously changed from the original) leaving most critics cold. The film was a modest commercial success and summed up the filmmaker’s performance during the ‘90s as it attempted to balance his personal touches with a commercial sensibility with uneven results.

Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) is a flashy, flamboyant, and very corrupt Atlantic City cop who attends a big-ticket prizefight where he meets Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), a United States Navy Commander and his straight-laced best friend from childhood. Dunne is in charge of security for Secretary of Defense Charles Kirkland (Joel Fabiani). During the course of the fight Kirkland is subsequently shot and killed by an assassin with Santoro as a key witness to the incident.

As Santoro investigates the murder he begins to realize that there was a lot more going on during the fight than he initially thought. Who was the beautiful redhead (Jayne Heitmeyer) sitting by herself? What happened to the woman (Carla Gugino) dressed in white talking to Kirkland just before he was shot? Why did the supposedly invincible champ (Stan Shaw) lose the fight so easily? The rest of the film follows Santoro's attempts to answer these questions and piece everything together.

Nicolas Cage clearly relishes the role as it allows him to cut loose and have fun with the character. This performance sees him reverting back to his old manic self that you can see bouncing through films like Raising Arizona (1987) or Wild at Heart (1990). Cage seems to be gleefully going over the top in many of the early scenes and it suits his egotistical cop character. Rick’s personality is as ostentatious as his tacky attire. Cage also isn't afraid to play a character that, initially, isn't that nice of guy. He's a self-serving cop only out for himself. He's not your traditional hero. As Rick’s investigation continues, however, and he realizes that there is more going on, Cage modulates his performance as his character wises up and tones down the flash as Rick applies skills he hasn’t used in ages. Cage’s character becomes much more interesting as his life gets increasingly complicated.

Kevin is everything that Rick is not – restrained and responsible. We soon learn that this is all an elaborate façade while with Rick what you see is what you get. Gary Sinise is excellent as the intense Navy Commander that seems too good to be true. That’s because he is and the actor plays an unreliable witness very well. Initially, we don’t have any reason to doubt him but after Rick questions Kevin De Palma audaciously reveals his real agenda so that we now know more than Rick does and spend the rest of the film watching him trying to figure it out. The scenes between Cage and Sinise are a lot of fun to watch as we see two veteran actors play so well of each other, especially as more revelations come to light.

De Palma's choice in actresses with a captivating presence is readily evident in his casting of Carla Gugino as the alluring key figure in the mystery and the only voice of reason in the film – a whistleblower trying to do the right thing. Sadly, she’s largely wasted in a role that amounts to nothing more than relaying expositional dialogue and then reduced to a damsel in distress.

Snake Eyes is a great looking film. De Palma is in fine form and he's got longtime cinematographer Stephen H. Burum (The Untouchables) behind the camera. This makes for a visually interesting film as Burum employs De Palma’s entire bag of tricks: split screens, unusual P.O.V. shots, skewed angles, and starts things off with a bravura 10+minute-long take with no cuts that introduces all of the major characters and the world they inhabit. De Palma does it all while following Rick, which provides all kinds of insights into that man – what he does, his relationship to others and his larger than life personality. It gives Cage a chance to show off, which he does in typical flashy fashion. This long take also forces us to pay attention to not just the people Rick interacts with but also the background details. It is important to what happens later on. This opening sequence also establishes the most crucial relationship in the film – the one between Rick and Kevin, which is increasingly put to the test.

David Koepp’s screenplay presents the Kirkland assassination Rashomon-style as we see it repeatedly from the point-of-view of key figures so that we get more pieces of the puzzle, figuring it out as Rick does. It’s an interesting way to present a thriller of this kind and De Palma and Koepp keep things together for the most part, but one character delivers a monologue near the end of the film that seems like something a Bond villain would spout. For the most part, the director manages to keep us engaged after the show-stopping first ten minutes, but loses it at the film’s climax, which strains credulity.

Initially, Brian De Palma had Al Pacino in mind to play Rick Santoro with an older man-young man dynamic with the Kevin Dunne role. However, Pacino had just done that with Donnie Brasco (1997) and was hesitant to repeat himself. Then, Gary Sinise became available and De Palma went with him and Nicolas Cage, changing the dynamic to characters that were the same age. Sinise worked with De Palma, developing his character’s backstory and motivation for what he was doing while the director had Cage watch screwball comedies because he wanted the actor to say his dialogue at “that Howard Hawks-like speed.” Cage also came up with his character’s flashy attire.

De Palma decided to have the long take at the beginning of the film because he wanted to “show the whole universe that the Nick Cage character was in. I wanted to show HIS world, I wanted to show it really fast, and I wanted to show it whole, in an exciting venue.” He found shooting the actual sequence “akin to a high-wire act: you can get very exhilarated trying to pull it off. It’s also very energizing for the actors. There is a kind of excitement in their performance that you don’t get when you start shooting in master shots, then medium shots, then close-ups.” The opening tracking shot was actually compromised of four SteadiCam shots because 20-minute camera magazines did not exist.

Initially, De Palma had the idea that the ending was to involve Deus ex machine: “we were dealing with such a corrupt world that the only way to solve the problem is to have a hurricane come through and wipe it all away.” Test screening audiences did not like it and so De Palma shot another ending, “which I don’t think is as effective.” Screenwriter David Koepp remembers that in the original ending Rick saved Kevin but test audiences wanted the bad guy to get his comeuppance.

Snake Eyes received mostly mixed to negative reviews. Roger Ebert gave it out one out of four stars and wrote, “Then comes an ending so improbable it seems to have been fashioned as a film school exercise: Find the Mistakes in This Scene.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “If nothing else in Snake Eyes matches the opening sequence in adrenaline-pumping excitement, the movie never quite fizzles. It just gets sillier and more exaggerated in the self-parodying ways Mr. De Palma’s movies often do.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “D” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “The camera choreography is exquisite, but De Palma is so entranced with staging his purplish voyeuristic set pieces that we can hardly believe a minute of what we’re seeing. He’s become the masturbator of suspense.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “Both Koepp’s script and De Palma’s directing style encourage the actors to be over-emphatic, and macho posturing is high on the list of the film’s weaknesses.” Finally, in his review for the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “Mr. De Palma and his collaborators have told a comparatively simple story with a very rich and resourceful mise en scene. This sort of mastery has become so rare in today’s mainstream movies that I find myself more bewitched and beguiled than perhaps I should be.”

Ever the consummate professional, De Palma orchestrates key sequences for maximum impact as he ratchets up the tension by placing certain characters in dangerous situations that they narrowly escape. At times, Snake Eyes seems like a film of two minds. On one hand, it wants to have the stylistic flourishes of De Palma’s more personal work while fulfilling the generic conventions of a thriller. That being said, the film is pure eye candy thanks to Burum’s virtuoso camerawork, which does most of the heavy lifting as does Cage’s deliciously manic performance. Snake Eyes may lack the depth of other De Palma films, like Blow Out (1981), but he seems content to deliver an entertaining thriller utilizing every stylistic trick in his impressive arsenal with the skill of a master filmmaker. The film may lack any kind of real substance but it is wonderful visual eye candy. There’s something enjoyable about letting an expert craftsman like De Palma manipulate us because he does it so well.

SOURCES

Behar, Henri. “Brian De Palma on Snake Eyes.” Film Scouts. August 1998.

Jones, Wil. “David Koepp Interview: Mortdecai, Jurassic Park, Indy 4.” Den of Geek! January 23, 2015.

Taylor, Drew. “Brian De Palma Talks Passion, Digital vs. Film, Psychosexual Thrillers and the Abandoned Ending of Snake Eyes.” The Playlist. July 30, 2013.