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.

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.

Watchmen

With 2007’s 300, Zack Snyder proved himself to be the fanboy’s dream: a director who would take a source and transpose it almost literally to the screen. He didn’t particularly care if the result was a good movie, but then neither do the hardcore fans. If you ask the average superfan whether he’d like to see a director take creative liberties with source material to make a unique product or just copy and paste the panels from a comic or the prose from a novel and he respond the latter 9 times out of 10.

Snyder heard the lament of the fanboy, and went about making what must surely be the closest adaptation of a comic book ever made. There are Shakespeare films that don’t come this close to the source material. Entire pages of the comic come to life as Snyder’s effects team and designers perfectly recreate settings, costumes, and even characters (nearly all of the actors look eerily like Dave Gibbons’ sketched heroes). The opening credits alone will fill the average fan with indescribable glee (or maybe that’s just me). Visually, this is one of the most beautiful, eye-popping movies ever made.

It is also one of the most poorly-paced, poorly-acted and poorly-directed films of recent years. Alan Moore’s dystopic, alternate universe 1985 gave us a world full of vigilantes, a king Nixon, and a superhero who sent that version of Earth off course from our own. Yet it was all scarily plausible, and remains so long after the end of the Soviet Union and the fear of nuclear holocaust, all because Moore filled the world with so many understated themes -- ranging from social commentary to an indictment of comics themselves – that it continues to fascinate readers decades later.

Snyder, to his credit, understands these themes, certainly more than the Wachowski brothers, who turned V For Vendetta from a slice of anarchist rebellion into a “Vote Democrat” PSA. But these themes are promptly glossed over as if they were part of the special effects. For all the political fears Moore conjured, the message at the heart of Watchmen is quite simple: anyone who would put on a gaudy spandex costume and dole out their notion of ‘justice’ is at the very least unbalanced. But this theme doesn’t hold much weight when married to Snyder’s love of ultra-violence. The biggest changes from the book – apart from the ending which still leads to the same result as the original one – are scenes of added gore that add nothing but shock value.

Snyder focuses so much on this gore and on the visuals as a whole that the lines (haphazardly lifted from the novel without care) come off as laughable and the pacing will put 75% of the audience to sleep. The actors look the part, but only Jeffery Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley pull off their roles. Haley in particular proves that if Clint Eastwood really did retire from acting he should hire the man as his proxy, as he commands the role of Rorshach with a gravel voice and a steely exterior that belies the character’s madness.

But not even Haley can breathe life into this bloated, self-absorbed affair. Snyder crafted what basically amounts to 2-1/2 hours of exposition punctuated by action sequences that revel in the violence the comic condemned. He turned a complex character study and political statement into facile psychoanalysis of characters in whom he never bothers to invest. And he put together what may just be the worst soundtrack of all time; I’ve watched anywhere between 1600-2000 movies, and I’ve never heard a soundtrack more intrusive and ill-chosen as this.

When you review a movie, you have to know who the audience for the film will be. You don’t necessarily have to care, but you should know what that group will make of the film. I have no clue who the audience for Watchmen is. Those who haven’t read the book are going to feel mightily letdown by an ad campaign that suggested an action romp and not a political thriller, while despite Snyder’s direct translations a great many of the diehards will find some omissions outrageous. That kind of reverence deifies what it seeks to make entertaining, crafting a shrine, a museum reconstruction, instead of a film. When all the dust settles, Watchmen’s legacy will be the proof that “looking like the book” ultimately means little when it comes to entertainment value.

Righteous Kill

In 1995, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, who are tied for second in my book on the list of all-time greatest cinematic actors behind Marlon Brando, appeared in a scene together for the first time in the film “Heat.” For many, Michael Mann’s near three-hour masterpiece was worth the price of admission alone. Fast forward 13 years, and someone finally put out a movie full of Al and Bob interaction. Sadly, thanks to a shoddy script and director Jon Avnet’s inept cinematography, “Righteous Kill” is an utter waste of a golden opportunity.

DeNiro and Pacino play, respectively, Turk and Rooster, two aging yet still gung-ho detectives who suddenly find that all those bad guys who got acquitted by juries are turning up dead. Before long, they, along with the two prerequisite brash, younger detectives (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg) come to the conclusion that only a cop could have committed the crimes. As they investigate, the brazen Turk finds himself constantly in hot water with the lieutenant, played by the marvelous character actor Brian Dennehy, and in a bizarre relationship with another detective, Karen (Carla Gugino).

Karen’s sexual quirks and general behavior make her far and away the most entertaining character, yet Avnet takes the beautiful, talented and interesting Gugino and shoves her to the side to make room for more Pacino and DeNiro time. The whole film revolves around our old buddy cops. As Internal Affairs breathes down their necks, the two go to bat for each other and make sure both are absolved.

One officer remarks that “they’re like Lennon and McCartney.” That analogy is ridiculous and it doesn’t even work; it means to say that the two are so close there must be some friction, but Lennon and McCartney came to loathe each other with such a passionate hate that, if harnessed, could have broken the world of oil dependency even before Carter’s administration. That bit of ineptness serves as a microcosm for the film’s mistakes.

The inherent problem with this wannabe thriller is evident from the start. It opens with a character’s confession on a grainy surveillance camera, which immediately knocks the list of suspects down to two, including any twist that might come along. What writer Russell Gerwitz doesn’t seem to understand is that a twist ending makes for suspense, and you can’t even have a twist ending when you narrow the options down to two.

A good mystery gives you a veritable avalanche of suspects; this chucks a melting snowball at you. To cover up for the thin plot, Avnet frantically edits scenes together to make it more exciting, which not only doesn’t work, but cuts scenes before Pacino and DeNiro can really come alive.

He also uses a lot of unnecessary tricks; there are tracking shots in the Coens’ “Burn After Reading” that follow the hollow footsteps of CIA paper pushers as they travel to and from the office of their superiors. That shot was a visual metaphor for the ineffectiveness and waste of the organization; here, Avnet aims the camera at the floor, seemingly chasing a light refraction the way a cat tries to catch a laser pointer.

His sloppy cuts ironically render Pacino’s and DeNiro’s scenes meaningless, and those scenes push the interesting cast of supporting actors out of the way. In the end, Pacino and Leguizamo get in some great one-liners, Gugino and Dennehy are horribly under-utilized, and we get only one genuinely entertaining scene between the two titans. It’s a crying shame because these two actually put in some of their best acting in years; DeNiro brought back his snarling venom normally reserved for Scorsese films, and Pacino even dropped those annoying “hoo-ha’s” and “whoa’s.”

Nevertheless, the utter lack of suspense, coupled with more stumbling ineptitude from Jon Avnet (who released “88 Minutes,” Al Pacino’s worst film to date, earlier this year) broke “Righteous Kill’s” leg before it managed to get out of the gate.