Far as I can make out, Sisters was Palma's first big success. Sure, it has some of the cliches of the horror/thriller genre (a crazy twin sister, a Psycho-esqe butcher knife, the black guy dies first), but it also brings with it a solid visual style and Margot Kidder as a French-Canadian model/actress AND frenchcanadamodelactress's sister. I gotta say, she's a delight. Seeing her be so good makes me sad that I can't name much she's been in outside of Superman. It doesn't hurt she shows up wearing this.
For a second I thought I walked into an anime. An anime about twin sister's, one who is crazy, with blood...wait. Yeah, that's an anime.
After enjoying Sister's, you might feel like checking out some of De Palma's other films. And that's only natural. You might say to yourself, I think I'll watch Mission Impossible. Nothing wrong with that. You might say to yourself, I think I'll watch Scarface. Nothing wrong with that. You might say to yourself, I think I'll watch Snake Eyes.
Just hang on for one minute there. Much like watching 3-D movies, watching Snake Eyes comes with special instructions. When you pop the movie in, pay special attention to the movie time running on your DVD player. Eventually the timer is going to get to 21:26. At this point, stop the film. Eject it from your player. The movie is over. If you wish, you can go back to the beginning and watch it to the 21:26 mark. Reveal in Nicolas Cage being Nicolas Cage. See Gary Sinise recite dialogue with no facial expression. Watch and rewatch the opening shots, all cleverly edited and shot so as to appear as one long continuous tracking shot. It's a hoot. Then take it out of your player. Return it to the store, throw it away, run a lighter under it, whatever.
Maybe you aren't willing to trust me on this. And that's fair. Let me break it down for you.
After the 21:26 mark, Nic Cage is going to start unraveling the mystery. He's going to talk to a boxer who took a dive, a mysterious woman in a blonde (blonde in the silver sense) wig, ruffians, and cohorts in a conspiracy that led to the killing of the Secretary of Defense. You're going to be right there with him. Yeah, the acting's a little off (I'm sorry Gary. It's not your best work. It looks like you popped half a morphine roll and then walked on set. You deliver your lines with all the enthusiasm of a CSI cop...Now it all makes sense), but man, this thing is shot so well. And not horror movie of the week, at least it looked good well, but I mean, well. And the closer Nic gets to the truth, the more you want to know the truth. Until he finds out the truth.
After Nic finds out what's going on, the movie takes a nosedive. The third act is horrible. It becomes I-solved-the-mystery-now-what-should-we-do-for-a-half-hour? Beat up on Nicolas Cage? Sure why not. And I'd let you watch the 2nd act (roughly 21:26-1:02:30) but then you're going to want to watch the third act. And then you're going to be disappointed. As it stands, you've seen a good 1st act that you'll remember, for visual reasons if nothing else, for years to come.
The problems are three fold. I'll pause here for an intermission if you need to go grab a fresh can of Diet Cherry Pepsi from the fridge.
Alright, the first problem is the climax. Everything's been building up and up, there's a literal hurricane building outside, Nic has to look over his life as a corrupt cop and decide just how corrupt he is, Sinise makes a facial expression (arguably he makes three, but I'm siding on it just being one long expression) Then the film just kind of drops. Like if you cut the final church scene out of The Killer.
The 2nd and 3rd problems are tied together. While Cage is doing his search for information schtik, the audience is given the info about who the bad guy is around the 43:00 mark. So, when Cage gets told what's going on, we don't really care so much. We've known for 18 minutes. In Twitter time, that's enough for Trent Reznor and Amanda Palmer to get into a animal/vegetable/mineral free for all. And when Cage expresses disbelief and sets out to get more evidence, we don't really care. We know the truth.
The 3rd problem is due to timing. Nic gets his whodunit info right at the 1:00:00-1:03:00 mark. Now, there's this film theory called the Golden Ratio theory (it applies to music, photography, painting, etc. You can read more about it by clicking the title. It'll give you something to think about when you hit the recording studio), that, to put it simply says that whatever happens in the film at the 61.8% mark is very important, either to the plot, or to character, or to theme, or what have you. For example, it's when Luke meets Leia. But when Nic finds out all the answers at the mark, which should matter (a lot!), it doesn't really matter to us, because we all know who the killers are, if not why the killers are.
If the 3rd act had been slammin, it wouldn't really have mattered. I'm an American, if you bring some hot 3rd act action, I can overlook most anything. But Snake Eyes didn't. So I can't.
Don't even get me started on the weaker than weak working in the movie title into the dialogue. Snake Eyes? Really? That's the best we can do?
In retrospect, after the first act just mute the sound.
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