a5c7b9f00b In the US-government&#39;s special ops, Scott is a shooter, not a planner, doing the job without regard to quaint or obsolete convention. When a Harvard undergrad goes missing (the daughter of a US leader), it&#39;s Scott who applies the pressure, first to her boyfriend, then to a madam whose cathouse is the initial stop en route to a white slavery auction in Dubai. The abductors may not know the girl&#39;s identity, but once they figure it out, she&#39;s doomed. Deadly double crosses force Scott to become a planner. Through it all, earnest TV newscasters read the drivel they&#39;re handed. The investigation into a kidnapping of the daughter of a high-ranking US government official. WOW. Whatamovie. Mamet&#39;s talents have culminated into this masterpiece. Everything in this film works. The editing, acting, dialogue and script, cinematography, and fast-paced suspense are flawless. Haven&#39;t been this entertained and excited by sheer filmmaking since Gladiator, Requiem for a Dream, or Mamet&#39;s The Spanish Prisoner. Grade A, and esquisite. I just saw this film many months after its US theatrical release, and was glad when it arrived to Irish screens in August to calmed critical waters. What a knockout. After Mamet&#39;s lifeless crap of comedic multi-ending-ed twist caper, Heist, I figured, well, he had a good run. Huzzah, mahalo, time to cash in your chips. But Spartan is much more Spanish Prisoner than we&#39;ve seen from him in the past couple of years. A real taut puzzler that dips its toes in the great overly paranoid political shockers of the Nixon era.<br/><br/>It&#39;s easy to pinpoint the overtly Hollywood-esque sequences of the film (notably, a dog tired opening sequence of a military training exercise guisedan actual frenzied pursuit and the finale&#39;s James Bond worthy jabbering heavy fishing in the dark for his assured prey with a double-fisted chrome peacemaker), but what&#39;s completely refreshing about the script and Mamet&#39;s stark and confident execution is how is so obviously bored to hell he is by the run of mill expositions that practically every other filmmaker would pander to in making a political thriller. A girl has disappeared. The Secret Service is involved. The photo of the girl is a toothy Glamour Shots groaner. In Mamet&#39;s hands, only an idiot would need further explanation. She&#39;s Chelsea Clinton in Bush&#39;s terror-obsessed present day, though the word &quot;president&quot; isn&#39;t even mentioned until her recovery is almost positively void.<br/><br/> From there, the film never really stops to let the common denominator viewer in. It becomes an episode of NYPD 24/7 minus the occasional confessionals. Mamet&#39;s coup de grace is embodied in his use of Ed O&#39;Neilthe Secret Service power chain&#39;s absolute trump card. We know he&#39;s the real deal, not solely because otherwise cool, in-control characters stutter in his presence, but because Mamet keeps the camera on him for the entirety of his graceful swoop into the think-tank of the investigation. We don&#39;t need to watch the underlings quake around him, his face says that he&#39;s used to it, and he no longer cares to judge them in their compromised state. O&#39;Neil&#39;s on screen presence, aside from his almost stigma-earning stint on Married With Children, has consistently been impressive, carving a new sub-career in intelligent, intimidating characters. Here, hopefully, viewers will look beyond his TV past and see what a great character actor he could be if only casting agents could fathom pairing him with other gruff mugs like Anthony Hopkins and Robert Duvall.<br/><br/>But that&#39;s not to overshadow Kilmer. With such a curious character most actors would only muster a sort of emblematic impression of a real man, but Kilmer, having a great year (playing John Holmes taboot, the absolute 180 from his nameless (Scott, Bobby, Curtis?) Army ranger here), meets the role with subdued ballsyness. He is exactly what De Niro&#39;s character in Ronin was pining to be, though the film was so recoiled at depicting human connections that all attempts just ended in the usual glib, hard-nosed Vet caricatures and bald retorts. <br/><br/>In one of the more engaging sequences I&#39;ve seen since Guy Pierce&#39;s Leonard Shelby introduction in Memento (though Mamet all but draws it out with a giant magic marker in the previous scene), Kilmer walks out of a FBI-squatted general store, has a fire fight with what may either be an innocent civilian or a disguised Fed, guns down a policeman with the same bullet magazine, and takes two convicts on what appears to be the road trip getaway from hell, in a scene that in the slim 100 minutes of the film actually has only the most minimal of results in regards to the end all plot, but proves to be Mamet&#39;s (and Kilmer&#39;s) most masterful stroke of filmic artistry that will ensure the film a lasting DVD reinterpretationthe most overlooked film of the year.<br/><br/>With Spartan, Mamet, like O&#39;Neil, proves that he&#39;s only a few works short of shaving the Hollywood conventions that keep his work just ever so short of being Oscar-worthy and wholly definitive. The problem with Spartan isn't so much that it's mediocre, but that it could be a whole lot better.
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373 weeks ago