This spy story is . . .. . . mediocre Mamet, yet still entertaining
'You've got to get me to the tall corn," Val Kilmer says with deadpan urgency, talking into a pay phone in the midst of the film-noir hugger-mugger that is David Mamet's Spartan.An entertaining foray into a world of spy guys, stakeouts and secret government machinations, Spartan teems with the kind of terse crypto-speak that is the playwright and filmmaker's stock-in-trade. Lines that sound like old saws, but that Mamet just made up. Even an everyday "How 'bout those Sox?" (a lot of Spartan transpires in Boston) becomes laced with layers of irony and intrigue.
'You've got to get me to the tall corn," Val Kilmer says with deadpan urgency, talking into a pay phone in the midst of the film-noir hugger-mugger that is David Mamet's Spartan.
An entertaining foray into a world of spy guys, stakeouts and secret government machinations, Spartan teems with the kind of terse crypto-speak that is the playwright and filmmaker's stock-in-trade. Lines that sound like old saws, but that Mamet just made up. Even an everyday "How 'bout those Sox?" (a lot of Spartan transpires in Boston) becomes laced with layers of irony and intrigue.
Kilmer is Scott (that's a last name), a government operative we first encounter directing a mysterious military training exercise in the woods, where soldiers stalk one another and everyone meets back at the barracks so he can tell them, "It's all in the mind - that's where the battle is won."
In his unit: a strapping woman in camouflage greens (Tia Texada) and a sharp-eyed young trainee (Derek Luke). Both figure in the later action, in which the college-going daughter of the president has been abducted by a band of international sex-slave traders. Either that, or she's been killed - it's up to Scott, a lone-wolf agent, to find out.
Other folks poking their heads through the door to deliver a phrase or two include William H. Macy as a steely Secret Service honcho, and, um, Ed O'Neill as a steely Secret Service honcho. And Mamet helps out the Screen Actors Guild membership with walk-on or one-line jobs as government agents, nightclub workers, drivers, bodyguards, prostitutes and TV news reporters. In a timeworn Hollywood tradition, Spartan ends on an airport tarmac in some out-of-the-way locale, with a rescue effort and a last-minute getaway.
On the Mamet meter, Spartan doesn't rate that high - the picture lacks the intricate con-game trickery of House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, the complex interpersonal dynamics of Heist and Homicide. By the nature of the tale, it is essentially a one-man operation: the stony-faced but pretty good Kilmer skulking around coastal New England cabins in the dead of night, or hopping a plane to Dubai and skulking around a guarded compound in the heart of the United Arab Emirates.
But that's not to say Spartan, with its templates of '40s noir and '70s political thrillers, isn't entertaining stuff. Even the signage on the sets is packed with prime prose. The walls of a clandestine government interrogation room read: "These are the precincts of pain, a goddess lives here, her name is Victory."
Get me to the tall corn.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea
at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.
Spartan
*** (out of four stars)
Produced by Art Linson and Moshe Diamant, written and directed by David Mamet, photography by Juan Ruiz Anchia, music by Mark Isham, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 47 mins.
Scott. . . Val Kilmer
Jackie Black. . . Tia Texada
Curtis. . . Derek Luke
Stoddard. . . William H. Macy
Burch. . . Ed O'Neill
Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, adult themes)
Playing at: area theaters