Living up to its title in more ways than one, David Mamet's Spartan is a taut, muscular kidnap thriller. Continuing his recent comeback, Val Kilmer plays Robert Scott, a top secret agent with an unnamed government body. After the president of the United States' daughter goes missing in an election year, Scott and some of his young proteges are recruited in the search and rescue mission. As that search becomes increasingly more futile and desperate, it becomes clear that everything may not be as cut and dried as the team once suspected.
A writer's writer, David Mamet's name is not one you'd expect to see in the general vicinity of a film with a plot like Spartan. But what's he's fashioned for the first hour is a clever and urgent thriller, in which nothing - you've guessed it, folks - is as it seems. Spinning a carefully controlled narrative web, Mamet's drive and technique are wholly in evidence, supplying his characters with their traditional quotas of meaty, robust dialogue.
Where he loses his way is with the final third of the picture. A placid, unlikely conversion takes place with one of the main characters, and the plot becoming the first casualty. And while its lasting impact is diminished somewhat by this oversight, Spartan, like most of Mamet's films, remains a puzzling affair that never quite convinces, but leaves you intrigued.
