Issue #29/54, December 17 - 29, 1998  

I don't know about you, but I'm getting pretty sick of starting every damn Kino Korner with a rundown of films I haven't been able to see because of scheduling mishmashes or because the Hungry Duck threw an anniversary party on the wrong day or something. If the damn theaters insist on premiering new movies on the very day the eXile hits the newsstands, then fuck 'em--I'll just have to content myself with reviewing whatever movies I happened to have seen in the last two weeks regardless of whether or not they're still playing around town (or ever were in the first place). Agreed? Good.

That said, let's take a closer look at a flick I've been not-quite-discussing for what seems like months now--Snake Eyes. As we're all painfully aware by now, this is the latest from Brian De Palma and stars Nicolas Cage--seemingly a recipe for success, but it's funny how even the simplest dish can sometimes get all mangled in a cluttered kitchen.

The conventional wisdom on this one is that it starts out stellar with one of those never-ending tracking shots that first-year grad students in film like to talk about in reverent tones between bong hits but abruptly turns to shit as soon as the first cut has been made. Don't believe the hype. The opening shot may be long, but that doesn't mean it's any better than the very similar shot in Boogie Nights. In fact, it's probably worse. Or at least less coherent.

In fact, even now that I've seen the damn thing I don't really have all that much more to say about it than I did last issue. It's basically De Palma at his worst (sort of a half-assed recap of his overrated Blowout with bits of Hitchcock--Vertigo mostly--thrown in to give it that classic touch) and Cage in one of those sleepwalking performances you wish he'd do a lot less of.

Plus, adding Gary Sinise into the mix is never a good idea. He's amusing here for his brief Bill Pullman impression in the closing scenes and in that he is made to do that sneering bit with his eyebrows even more forcefully than usual--a subtle hint that he's the bad guy, I guess, which only counts as giving away the big plot twist if you're a friggin' moron, which is your problem not mine. The last-minute attempt to humanize his villain by attaching a dubious motive to his depraved scheme is a half-baked goof that someone involved should have had the sense to cut.

Then once they give up on the suspense-thriller mode about halfway through, the whole enterprise devolves into a second-rate chase picture with the sole twist that it all takes within a casino/convention center in the space of a few hours, giving it that whole unity of time and place from classical tragedy thing, which might be good enough for a last-minute pop-culture-seminar term paper at Bowdoin College, but doesn't make this any more enjoyable to watch. De Palma also trots out the old replay the same scene from different viewpoints technique that Tarantino used to similarly unconvincing effect in Jackie Brown, and some nobody named Carla Gugino plays a number-cruncher posing as a slut, who nevertheless has much nicer tits than I've been led to expect of such bespectacled dead-end career girls. In the end, you'll almost certainly wish you'd stayed home to watch your well-worn copy of Fargo.

Ronin is what those in the ad-copy game like to call a thinking man's action pic. Now, it ought to go without saying that "thinking man's" is one of those code phrases that should set off alarm bells in any sensible person's head, as it is invariably used to describe a genre that has absolutely no business being associated with thought (thinking man's heavy metal--and its most visible representative, Queensryche--is just the first example that comes to mind). Like people who complain irrelevantly about comedies being "too immature," this is mere pointless babble that is used to pad the prose of hacks who can think of nothing better to talk about. In this particular case, the thinking man identifier basically boils down to the gunfights never being punctuated with reloads.

But again I say, don't believe the hype, for Ronin is not nearly as awful as its taglines and single-sentence pre-release reviews might lead you to believe. Directed by John Frankenheimer, whose long and illustrious career includes everything from overrated classics like The Manchurian Candidate to impossibly bad delights like 1996's The Island of Dr. Moreau, this one features a solid EU ensemble cast, with Robert De Niro hanging around to make sure the manipulative Old Country types don't get unnecessarily pretentious or infiltrate too many markets with their new-fangled single currency thing. The pacing is generally right on, the car chases are unusually well (i.e., intelligibly) filmed, the performances are understated without being bland, and even the double-subtitle action doesn't get too bothersome.

If you're smart, though, you'll stop watching once they're finished with the Riviera and head back up to Paris, because they really drop the ball at this point. More to the point, they let it unravel completely. Before you know it, the timing has gone completely to shit and your bladder starts reminding you about those three beers you drank in the lobby before the show. Sure enough, as in almost every other crime-oriented picture in recent memory, the faceless red-herring bad guy role is subcontracted out to a bunch of Russian gangsters played by Germans and various other Central Europeans (including Katarina Witt, who's in desperate need of a thighmaster but at least used to be a Commie, I guess). Then when it comes time to tie up all the loose ends, ideological or otherwise, it turns out the bad guy was some single-minded Irish Republican troublemaker who just can't get it through his drunken head that the Protestants up north actually enjoy being buggered by the English. Cue the American head coach to go into action and save the day (since the Euros are all too busy waiting in line for soccer tickets--except, notably the French properties master, played here by Jean Reno), which De Niro, you've got to hand it to him, manages without seeming like a total prick or stepping on too many ingrown Continental toenails.

Also, the music is almost uniformly crap, but I guess that's nothing new.