For a little more than half of its running time, writer-director David Mamet's "Spartan" is such a smart, tight thriller, the main question that rears up is:
Why did Warner Bros., for the second time in a young year, avoid screening one of its pictures for the local media⢠And a Mamet no less.
The main problem is that today's major-studio marketing departments don't know how to handle anything slightly offbeat. Give them superheroes and comedies about lecherous young men, and their ability to hype goes into overdrive.
The other problem, though, is the picture itself, which on one hand leads us where we've been much too often and on the other sends us home with too little resolved.
Neither fish nor fowl, "Spartan" doesn't qualify as a big commercial release nor a sufficiently thoughtful, original art-house picture.
Mamet gives us Scott (Val Kilmer), an apparently legendary warrior within his ranks, a can-do ex-Marine.
He trains recruits for some unspecified U.S. Government special operations agency that feeds, supports and/or monitors the FBI, the CIA and, in the main case here, the Secret Service.
You can tell by the way they're highlighted that the hard-nosed, sensitivity-intolerant Scott will wind up working with the most eager of his novices, Curtis (Derek Luke, who played "Antwone Fisher") and Jackie (Tia Texada).
Bearing in mind Mamet's taste for ambiguity, the apparent abduction of the apparently promiscuous Laura Newton (Kristen Bell) from the campus of Harvard University by a Middle Eastern sex slave trade organization leads to the sort of movie line that chills the blood: "Oh my God! They don't know who they've got."
Who they've got is the U.S. president's daughter, stolen while he was philandering in Boston -- ground Mamet trampled in "Wag the Dog" -- and while the first lady was drying out at a clinic.
Before, and for some time after, "Spartan" is a lean and efficient depiction of a foot soldier's dedication to duty -- all procedure and protocol, but with crisper than normal dialogue.
It's standard procedure in such movies that Scott will lose his partner, which in this case explains the title. The mission must be carried out in Spartan fashion by a lone gladiator.
Although hardly a prototypical Mamet actor comfortable with staccato delivery, as Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy are, Kilmer plays steel cold efficiency well. He's an effective vessel for what is required here.
It's the picture that lets him down.
Unlike Mamet's ingenious "The Spanish Prisoner," in which the deceptions within deceptions were not only ingenious but organic, "Spartan" goes the way of his "Heist," a crime film that wends nowhere in particular and simply winds down. Additional Information:
Details
'Spartan'Director : David Mamet
Stars : Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy
MPAA rating : R for violence and language
