Spartan (2004)

Terribly directed and written by David Mamet, the dialog, direction, and ultimately direction of "Spartan" deep-sixed a potentially interesting plot and story. Characters whip through their lines and dialog has the feel of being written by a singular voice. There's no variety in tone. Later in the runtime the dialog and story burns up in flames. By the last 20 min of runtime, I didn't care anymore and was laughing at the depth the movie had sunk. The actors involved are more talented than what this director fashioned; indeed Mamet aims for little to no emotion and the movie seems like a paranoid ramblings from a mental patient. 4/10 laughably bad.

I picked this movie based on a recommendation from a "best x conspiracy movies" list out there in the internet... what a bad choice. From the start this looked and sounded really cheap. I wanted to give it a chance so I continued to watch it, but oh my, it just got worse and worse. Val Kilmer is simply awful in it, and not even in a funny way, it's hard to think that he was even capable of such a b-movie, b- rater performance... in fact, giving him B-status is probably even a severe over-rating.The story, is actually alright, but ruined by the acting - William H Macy must really regret his bit-part in this...I said previously that it looked and sounded cheap... to elaborate: this movie was made in 2004, and looked and sounded like an early episode of X Files, and not in a good way.What a let down, from the beginning to the end.

Nearly ten years on, I decided to revisit this film, and found it riddled plot holes, inaccuracies, stilted dialogue and wooden delivery.Plot holes - Just after the rookie gets shot (again!), he takes apart his pager (who still used those in 2004?) and his Nokia, where he finds what we are meant to believe is a tracking device. Obviously, someone doesn't want him to investigate the house, and is able to plant a bug on his phone. Perhaps you might have wanted to look into that before haring off to the middle east. Later, Val finds another pager inside his knife. Apart from the extreme likelihood of this tracker falling out when he opened the knife, what was the power source? Unicorn's tears?Inaccuracies - Sub-machine guns are not accurate over long distances, and yet the rookie manages to shoot through walls to get his man. A lathe and plaster wall will not provide good cover against incoming fire, but it plays hell with the grouping of your shots, as the rounds will tumble any which way.Stilted dialogue - Clichés in a clichéd movie. There is nothing to get your teeth into here; the entire film is fluff. What would have been more interesting to watch is Val as the bad guy, trying to stop the daughter from reaching safety. Films portraying valiant and heroic rescuers are ten-a-penny, how about some real drama?Wooden delivery -Val has been attempting to portray the strong silent type for a long time, but his delivery is more monotonal than gruff. This may explain his casting for the role of the voice of Kit in the Knight Rider films.Conclusion - Avoid this film. Try Luc Besson's Taken instead.

First this isn't a spy movie, just another cliché ridden, cheesy police-action movie with a lot of gratuitous violence to compensate a poor script. Second, when the hero is an agent of the government, we expect it to behave according to the laws and not like a criminal, torturing and killing people for no reasons. When you justify the criminal behavior of the government giving the excuse of "emergency" or "national security" this gives a VERY dangerous message.Finally the whole movie is a mess, very confusing, with random shootings and beatings to cover plot holes. I can't realize how such a poor movie could get this high rating here.