Spartan

Synopsis: Robert Scott (Val Kilmer) is a top gun in a highly secretive special operations force. Recruited to find Laura Newton (Kristen Bell), the President's daughter and working with a special task force comprised of Presidential Advisors, the Secret Service, FBI and CIA, Scott and his protégé Curtis (Derek Luke) stumble upon a white slavery ring, which may have some connection to Laura's disappearance.

I'm a committed Mamet-watcher, enthralled by his Byzantine imagination, impressed by the quantity and diversity of his output and fascinated by his characteristically mannered dialogue. Verbal rather than visual, his films no doubt appeal to the more cerebral film-goer and anyone looking for familiar visual thrills and spills will be disappointed and more than a little discombobulated by his latest offering.

The prolific Mamet has made some good films like the early House Of Games and, when he over-indulges his cleverness, some not-so-good films, The Spanish Prisoner being a notable example. Spartan lies somewhere in between, an odd hybrid of Mamet's intellectual contrivance and multiplex action thriller, a combination which is engagingly encapsulated in Val Kilmer's man-with-no-name character.

As ever with Mamet, one gets the impression that the story, which as with most thrillers relies on a lot of improbably convenient contrivances is only the pretext for the display of the director's world-view. Not that Mamet is any tub-thumper. He does have some ongoing themes - the onus of being a man in a man's world, human duplicity, and so on. But at a deeper level he appears to be intrigued by the arbitrary artifice that is society and the way in which we all more or less unreflectively adhere to its conventions. Hence, whatever the plot, Mamet's iterative dialogic exchanges embody his real subject - the idea that that tangled webs are all that there is, that there is no meaning beyond our endless fabrications, whether for good or evil.

Kilmer's de-humanised Scott represents the unquestioning obedience, a mindless dedication to authority, that for Mamet is at the core of what is wrong with the world. The story of Spartan is of his costly redemption, a favourite multiplex trope to which Mamet rather disappointingly adheres. Lifting the film above and beyond the typical however are Mamet's verbal sparring and Juan Ruiz-Anchía's impressive cinematography which aptly sustains Mamet's dyspeptic tale of lies and more damned lies as the way of the Western world. Mention should also be made of Mark Isham's sensitively understated score.

FYI: Australian actor Kick Gurry (Garage Days) makes a short-lived appearance as Scott's sometime off-sider in Dubai.

 

 

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