"Spartan" (2004) - Movie Review

David Mamet’s “Spartan” understands and trusts the intelligence of audience to gauge the dire situation for themselves. Show than tell. The gravity of the situation and the operatives’ cold approach in pursuing the hunt for a girl named Laura Newton (Kristen Bell) lets it speak for the importance. Surgical in the story telling and still putting us in the dark of the real show runners, as serious the film gets, the fear is surmounted by the quickness of the agent Bobby (Val Kilmer) or Robert Scott. The name does not matter as it would not for a tight paced thriller to only know the target person. “Where is the Girl?” is the question Bobby chants as a mantra and when he asks that to a person tied under the rugged arms of his, he/she better tell it because he will not hesitate to snap their neck off.

I have got to admit that when I saw this film first time during a get together session, I did not like it. I should blame it on the constant distraction on the surroundings (which is understandable) and should not hold it against the film. I made myself to remember watching it again in the future and forgot. Grabbing the DVD from the store, my instincts proved worthy. Val Kilmer is a lone styled worker and it does not mean to work alone but be in a zone of operation only he can exist in without any issues with himself. He states the fact than to condescend cornering on his seniority or the effectiveness over his fellow officers or the rookie he trained and work with, Curtis (Derek Luke). His cold heart handling of the people to get to the objective shivers us. We distance ourselves from him but the skill and numbness he shows towards his job makes us think of the personalities in that line of work.

The investigation is not smooth and being to work with Secret Service, Bobby feels he is the perfect worker bee and does not want to get into the trouble of knowing the big picture. He is a robot. His characteristic of being hard and ruled in pursuit of the girl and since we see the happenings through his eyes, the neutrality of the story becomes precisely balanced. The dirty games behind it disappear and as him we too want to only retrieve the girl than to know the facts. In a general human reflection, the reasoning ties the final knot in knowing a story and Mamet’s sketch of this film erases those. We come back to the tone of it only when Bobby wants to know the truth and that too being more on the rescue than the totality of the event.

Often the term tight plot is used up. “Spartan” is more of a tight film. Watch how the scene of the first interrogation with a night watch agent Gaines (Stephen Culp) takes place. The calmness and stillness Kilmer holds on his face is shattered in a sudden outburst which is as much as true and as much as fake. His expressions are mathematically calculated that it is too perfect to be true. He sizes up his second encounter in extracting information from the girl’s boyfriend Michael Blake (Aaron Stanford). And how Mamet would have laid it out is as crucial as the two actors carry it out. There is nothing spectacular in the seriousness of the scene. Kilmer comes as a regular campus security guy to catch Blake in the act of breaking a post box. The next conversation is carried out on borderline by Kilmer and the body language of Stanford playing a miniscule part in the film. At one point there is the signal in the air in between these two. The boy knows that he is more than a security guard but plays it down to not open the Pandora’s Box and Kilmer’s Bobby wants him to know that. I might be over stating things but watch it out as it is the start of many such encounters but hardly have we time to grasp it due to rocket fast screenplay.

Thriller films provide a character study in bits and pieces. The mass of it might not be fully sufficient to know the characters but that’s what makes it suspenseful and unique. We still want to be surprised by what this guy is capable of. And that is been put to work very aptly and if I may add, quite dutifully by Mamet. There is no lecturing of truth, right, wrong, justice and that through as secretive are carried out without many words. A similar plot could have been typically handled in blowing up the magnanimity of the person disappeared quite early in other thriller movies but Mamet gauges that the current audience need not waste time in it. Because every one knows the enormity of it when the characters like Bobby are active and are in their best forms.