Spartan   

Scott: Val Kilmer

Curtis: Derek Luke

Burch: Ed O'Neill

Stoddard: William H. Macy

Jackie Black: Tia Texada

Laura Newton: Kristen Bell

Written & Directed by

David Mamet

Spartan is the story of a search for the missing daughter of the President of the United States.  To give away anything more than that would be a great disservice to anyone planning on seeing it.  Val Kilmer is the man sent to do the job and he is assisted by Derek Luke, among a host of other secret service and military personnel.  

Kilmer does a great job as the specialist enlisted to find the girl, and he is surrounded by an exceptional supporting cast, including William H. Macy, Ed O' Neill and Luke.  They all benefit greatly from David Mamet's screenplay.  Mamet is able to write dialogue like no other screenwriter in Hollywood.  It is crisp, clever, and intelligent and trusts the audience to be able to follow along without dumbing itself down. 

Mamet is also a skilled director and he does a nice job here.  Spartan starts and ends with scenes introducing the characters and showing what they are all about.  In between, however, Mamet effectively throws the audience into the middle of the action, forcing you to become involved.  The movie has a nice pacing that allows the story to unfold out in front of you as suspects are dismissed and the search is led to other places.  

Spartan is able to avoid the trappings of most conventional thrillers.  The storyline is straightforward enough, but there is more than just a surprise around every corner.  There's commentary here on prostitution, white girl slavery, and the inner workings of the military and prestigious families.  But, mostly, Spartan is about motives.  The reasons people do certain things that would, normally, seem out of character or wrongheaded.  

Nothing that happens in this film is too surprising, and that's a good thing.  We don't need a director to pull a rabbit out of his hat every time there is a crime story.  It is intriguing and fast-paced, and the plot twists are logical, if not shocking.  They eventually wind their way to a convincing and somewhat harrowing conclusion.  The shock lies not in what happened, but why it is so readily believable.