Snake Eyes
Rashomon with much more scantily clad girls, it’s Atlantic City after all. Seriously, it’s extremely sexualized, Carla Gugino is supposed to be the nerd whistleblower but she spends nearly the whole film in her underwear, and it’s fabulous.
The plot is basic but effective: evil military people want to harvest that money tree called “Department of Defense”, so they cook some books to sell a kind of Iron Dome to the military. Should have called it Golden Dome.
One of the nerd number crunchers is incensed the company is faking the results (won’t somebody think of the poor soldiers fighting wars of aggression overseas?), so she goes straight to the Secretary of Defense and he actually listens to her. Should have just sent a Signal message instead.
The company CEO is just a sleazebag, he need the dough to raze the casino they are in and make a new one, Vegas-style. It seems good to me, what’s wrong with it? Anyway, he conspires with some DOD adviser to avoid his cold feet by feeding him lead straight through the chest. They arrange it so the disgruntled employee is also killed, two extremely juicy tits in one stone.
Akshually, it’s killing three birds with one stone: the terrorist fake backstory is a Palestinian man radicalised by the American weapon sales to Israel. It’s hard to get better than this, the plan is ingenious.
But it all goes down the drain because of a single local cop, a Bad Lieutenant, but not in New Orleans. It’s not as sleazy, but it’s a similar Nic Cage tour de force. He was born for this kind of shit.
This guy has a wife and kid nagging him during the big fight, he has a kept girl on the side, and still throws himself at every single piece of ass he sees. He talks up one of those ringside girls holding the round number plaque, but grows a conscience after seeing the rack on our nerd whistleblower. Our hero, ladies and gentleman.
Since this is inspired by film noir, there’s also a big heavyweight champion boxer throwing a fight. Rocky III is mentioned explicitly.
It kinda loses steam towards the end, there’s no “big bad guy”, the DOD adviser also rants about protecting soldiers during their invasion of foreign countries, and he kills himself after appearing on TV. Our “hero” loses it all anyway, but the nerd girl comes back in the end to kiss him, before he goes to jail. Why the fuck? What does she see in him? This is like Ocean’s Eleven, if Tess did not know Danny from before, absolutely preposterous.
This was apparently filmed in a Trump casino, it is thanked in the credits. Also thanked in some Rick Santoro dude, for some reason. No, not Rick Santorum, I guess. No santorum here, no siree. Speaking of silly names, Kevin Dunn plays a newscaster interviewing the DOD adviser, Kevin Dunne.
The business dude doesn’t have much to do with Trump, just because he was involved in the production. The best part of this is imagining a remake where the Secretary of Defense is Hegseth (Kegseth / Whiskeyleaks). It ruins all the drama.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.