A three-unities drama (unity of time, place, action) about a political assassination and its immediate aftermath in a sealed-off Atlantic City casino. Brian De Palma, a director who believes his viewers should be able to see his direction, gives us here a great deal to look at, beginning at the very beginning, with an extended exercise in the Steadicam single-take and the dizzying flash pan (to disguise the cuts?), staking out the points of interest as the crime unfolds in front of us at a heavyweight championship fight. All of these points will be further explored and illuminated in first-person flashbacks, one of them a split-screen two-ring-circus affair, from the vantages of three separate participants. (We never do get back to the scantily clad Round 7 card girl who intrudes on the events with a cell-phone call. Red herring? Oversight? Cutting-room casualty?) There is a great deal of subjective camerawork in general, including the out-of-focus squinting of a myopic whose glasses get broken, and there is an omniscient overhead crane shot that floats over the honeycomb of neighboring rooms on the hotel's thirty-fifth floor. These are the main attractions. The platform across which they are paraded is a shoddy and shabby construction, sprung from the post-Warren Commission, post-Watergate paranoid orthodoxy that licenses anyone in the government, for any reason, to kill anyone else in the government along with any civilian who gets in the way. Nicolas Cage, as the hopped-up corrupt cop who suddenly has to turn patriotic, does not much temper his camera-conscious grandstanding to reflect the changes in his character. Gary Sinise, Carla Gugino, Stan Shaw, John Heard. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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