Nic Cage is not the most honest of cops, he is willing to take a bit of graft to help his career along. Gary Sinise is as upright as they come; a career army officer, now protecting a Senator. Once old friends, they meet at the front row of a heavyweight championship in Atlanta. When the Senator is assassinated, it's a race against time to find out who did it.

Despite the rather straightforward sounding plot, Snake Eyes is as idiosyncratic as De Palma gets. After the mechanical nature of Mission: Impossible, the story of Snake Eyes is used as a showcase for De Palma's bag of tricks.

The first 20 minutes is one long single shot (although purists will tell you it was done with three shots seamlessly edited together), following Nic Cage as he wanders through the arena, meeting people, chasing down some punk who owes him money, and up to the fight. Later flashbacks revisit the same moments, but (Rashomon-like) from different people's perspectives. The camera wobbles from first person perspective and spins around to show us every single detail (or so we think).

De Palma's bag is empty by the end, and the climax is a bit of a disappointment, particularly since (as if we couldn't guess) we are told who dun it a bit early, but Snake Eyes is heaps of fun most of the way, and Nic Cage obviously had a ball being completely beaten to a pulp. He hasn't acted this much for ages.