12 Movies You Can Stop Watching After The Opening Scene

Scarface director Brian De Palma is an inconsistent talent to put it politely—at his best the helmer calls to mind Hitchcock in his unparalleled execution of tension and his deft touch with potentially exploitative material. At his worst, he’s the man who made 2002’s embarrassingly misjudged dud Femme Fatale.

So in conclusion, the Carrie director’s career is a land of contrasts. But even his most ardent defenders would find little to prize in 1997’s bland conspiracy flick Snake Eyes, a rare film which manages to make nineties Nic Cage boring.

That said, even the harshest hater would have to concede that the film’s opening tracking shot, a blistering fourteen minute unbroken take which takes us behind the scenes at a Vegas boxing match, is an unparalleled technical achievement which blows even Scorsese’s Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas out of the water.

The sequence winds through buildings and around a large cast, constantly keeping the audience guessing how long the director can pull this trick off for—Shame it’s stuck in such an otherwise lame movie, mind.