Spartan

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What’s the Story?

When the daughter of the President of the United States goes missing, Secret Service Agent Scott (Val Kilmer) is called in on the investigation. Speed is the top priority. Secrecy comes next. Niceties like Constitutional protections and not killing people who might be innocent are lower down on the list. Scott and able trainee Curtis (Derek Luke) think they are getting close to finding the girl when the word comes down that she and a college professor have been found dead following a boating accident, and they are ordered to end their investigation. But that is when Scott, always a "how" man, not a "why" man, finds that he cannot travel as light as he thought. It isn't so much that he wants to understand who the bad guys are. He just wants to get the girl back. Even if she doesn't want or deserve to come home.

Is It Any Good?

There are three different stories in this latest effort from writer/director David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, State and Main). Only one of the three is pretty good -- a rescue mission to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of the president. The second is a passable, if overly familiar, story of a man developing a broader sense of his own values. And then there is a poorly handled story about government corruption and manipulation of the media. As that thread takes over in the last third, the movie falls apart.

Mamet is fine when it comes to tension, confrontation, and tough attitude, but as a director his idea of action sequences is to have people unexpectedly get shot. The dialogue is Mamet lite, with none of the brilliant riffs that energize his other scripts. He fumbles the tone of the movie by committing the very last sin his characters would permit -- he loses control with preposterous multiply paranoid layers that wear out instead of boring in.