An Icy Staging from David Mamet

[Review]

An Icy Staging from David Mamet
review by Chris Knipp

Mamet's Spartan doesn't quite feel like fun, but it almost feels efficient. It seems to make sense, but then again, it probably doesn't.

Val Kilmer is strong as an invincible maverick lone wolf ranger Marine secret agent type who's so good, or so independent, or just so idealized, that he can run his own show, even when he's single handedly retrieving the president's daughter from the clutches of a dubiously Middle Eastern band of flesh-trading miscreants. Kilmer calls her "the girl", and the film itself is shrouded in anonymity as if it were a 12-step program for spy adventure freaks.

An intricate story unfolds whereby “she” turns out to have been kidnapped from college because her secret service protection went AWOL. That turns into a cover-up for the president's philandering, and since it's an election year, his handlers decide to let the girl go and pretend she's dead, which leaves her in a fix, because she's been nabbed by Arab white slavers who don’t even know who she is. Silly Arab slavers! The fingerprints of Mamet’s post 9/11 racial meltdown are plain to see.

To atone for this -- or more accurately just to widen the demographic -- there are some prominent minority roles. The movie begins with a war game exercise supervised by Kilmer wherein his two future sidekicks chase each other, a black man panting through the woods behind a Latino woman. As a reward for this performance Curtis (Derek Luke), the young African American, gets to have his head blown off; and the tough chica he was chasing (Tia Texada) gets to be the last-minute rescuer, shot in the film's final minutes. Kilmer emerges with minor wounds, appearing in a brief afterward to show he's survived. `The girl' is whisked off from Dubai in a Scandinavian plane. What becomes of her, we will never know.

Kilmer is a soulful automaton at best, and in his wake, the viewer is left with nothing- no visual splendors, no emotion, no real impression. Surprisingly, arch-nerd, William H. Macy, makes a pretty mean amoral bureaucrat as the president's handlers' enforcer, and the actors in general do good work where they can.

And while Mamet's screenplay has some justifiably harsh things to say about American political morals, the film as a whole is plagued by racial misplay and a general coldness at every turn. Mamet is thought to be a brilliant playwright, but he's much less successful as a filmmaker or film writer, because his ingenious wordsmithery and richly simple characterizations seem strangely out of place in the intensely detailed physicality of a film. In the case of Spartan, he starts with a game but never gets beyond that, a mode of storytelling best fit for the stage. On screen, his attempt at the action genre is khaki, neutral, and pared down to the point that there's nothing much to look at or feel.

Spartan opened nationwide in March 2004.

Art and reviews at ChrisKnipp.com.