A movie cannnot become a great movie in the last minute. Gimmick movies containing a last minute revelation have become more common and more contrived in the last several years. It is not that the concept is anything new, as the concept goes back decades. But when The Sixth Sense became a blockbuster and The Usual Suspects won an Academy Award, other filmmakers saw the need to mine this idea for all it was worth. Matchstick Men I especially disliked.
Which brings me to Spartan. David Mamet has made the "con" type of movie more than once, and I was afraid that Spartan would hinge on such tricks. It did not. Spartan is a very effective, taut thriller. The biggest surprise is that Spartan is an action movie, a type of movie that Mamet is not usually associated with.
Not many action movies are going to play The Overlooked Film Festival. That is because such movies usually make a fair amount of money, as they tend to be easy to market to the audiences thirsting for mindless, escapist entertainment. For some reason Warner decided to drop Spartan on theaters with very little marketing push, and the result was that no one knew about it save a few critics.
The critical reception is somewhat mystifying. Spartan is essentially a genre movie. That genre, action, is dominated by lame, moronic pieces that are forgotten as soon as the credits role. So the intelligent Spartan should have stood out as an outstanding effort in that area. Instead the movie received a wide range of reviews, with only 64% favorable on the tomatometer. Many of the negative reviews harp on Mamet, and it makes me think that Mamet should use an alias. Then again, so should Michael Bay, but in Bay's case I do not think it would make a difference.
