The witness to a terrible gangland slaying, the mcguffin getting those motherfucking Snakes up onto the Plane, rather ostentatiously drains a can of Red Bull as he steps off his motorbike. The audience I was with laughed–if the can had been flashing neon, we couldn’t have been more savvy consumers, fully aware of how the movie was shilling before it began. A short while later (in the quick dispensing of plot), as the witness watches a tv news report about the slaying (and just before the goons come calling to gun him down), the camera slyly includes in the frame around the tv literally stacks of Red Bull cans, all wrapped in plastic. Five minutes and most of the plot later, the witness having been saved by FBI hero Sam Jackson is being cajoled/bullied into testifying, and the good guys toss on the table some evidence of him from the scene of the slaying: encased in a baggie, a drained can of Red Bull.
I really wanted to like Snakes, but the film is an aggressively smart-ass deployment of the crude tools of B-film without any of the smarts or real pleasure the best B-films and recreations of B-films offer. Continue reading Snakes on a Product Placement