Rating: 
Summary: Mamet is coasting
Review: on Glengarry Glen Ross...still!I endured this last night and will now try to spare you the experience. I had a bad feeling during the first few minutes. Then, about 10 minutes in, there is a scene where two Delta trainees are in a room together. Oh man, I could feel it coming, but I didn't want to believe it. Sure enough, the training sargent issues his instructions and steps back. Last man standing joins the unit. At times I laughed, but basically by the end of the movie I was sick to my stomach that I had paid $4 and two hours of my life watching this. Although when the wooden Kilmer leans over his female accomplice at the end and says, "Oh baby", I did have one last chuckle. No more Mamet for me.
Rating: 
Summary: title of review
Review: Overall this film is an interesting, engaging thriller, if you can overlook all the minor details that are impossible to follow. It seemed like every minute there was some piece of dialogue or plot development that left me scratching my head wondering what the hell it was supposed to mean or what relevence it had to anything. I'm not talking about plot holes that could possibly be oversights, I'm talking about parts of the script that just make absolutely no sense. Mamet is clearly a writer that knows his craft, but it seems sometimes he gets lost in it, loses touch with reality, and doesn't consider whether what he writes is presented in a way that will make sense to someone other than him. I think about 30% of the questionable details in the film could be figured out by your average person, another 20% possibly by people who are exceptionally intelligent and have insight into matters such as international espionage, but the other 50% could not possibly make sense to anyone but Mamet himself. He jumps into scenes when the action is already in progress, for example opening the interrogation scene with a bunch of brow-furrowing dialogue exchanges, which even at the end of the scene don't seem to have been tied together in any way. Are we supposed to just ignore all the nonsensical jabbering throughout the film? Are we supposed to just gloss over it? Consider it atmosphere and just follow the things that are fully conveyed? I don't know, it just seems like this movie was designed to be enjoyed by psychic aliens who have some insight into every nuance of Mamet's intent, because so many details of this film are not conveyed to the extent that they could be expected to be comprehended by any rational, intelligent human. This film was a frustrating viewing experience. I think Proof Of Life is a similar, superior film. I'd advise watching that instead.
Rating: 
Summary: IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME
Review: SPARTAN opens with a puzzling scene in which we are obviously viewing some kind of military training endeavor. Just who or what is vague and only after the movie is into its crux do we understand a little what's going on. The complex David Mamet penned plot finds Val Kilmer as a determined secret service man who is challenged to find out who has abducted the daughter of the US President. He is paired with one of his trainees, an eager Derek Luke, who comes in and out of the movie, and once out completely, never mentioned again. William H. Macy and Ed O'Neill are around to play high level aides to the President. The plot is complex, and at times confusing, but the style of the movie is interesting and Kilmer offers a solid enigmatic performance. Kristen Bell who plays the daughter is very good in her brief scenes, but the movie ends on a downer, but how else could it end?
Not an easy movie to watch, but not as bad as some other reviewers made it out to be.
Rating:
Summary: Could have been so much better!
Review: Spartan was a big disappointment, though I should have known something was wrong when none of the copies at the video club had been rented out (...and here I was thinking myself lucky!).
Val Kilmer does a lousy job of portraying a secret service agent on a mission to rescue the president's daughter from slavers.
The potential for a good movie was definitely there, but the surprisingly poor acting/casting and the full of holes plot prevented it from becoming anything more than a flop. As other reviewers have pointed out, what were the director and producer thinking? But more importantly, what was Val Kilmer thinking? Was he so desperate for a role that he didn't object to this travesty?
Do not expect anything like Top Gun, Willow, or the Saint here.
As for the connection with glorious Sparta (title) it is rather an unfortunate parallel bordering on ludicrous.
Overall, both Val Kilmer as well as the rest of the "cast" do a rather poor job of trying to cover up for the mediocre plot; wait `til Spartan is shown on TV.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible! 0 Stars!
Review: This has to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen in my life. The story is interesting but the dialog and acting is absolutely dreadful. Hearing Val Kilmer running around calling everybody "baby" was painful. It took everything I had to watch the entire thing. Sometimes the dialog was so bad and so cheesy that it didn't make a lick of sense. Honestly, I've seen pornos with better acting.
Rating: 
Summary: superb political espionage thriller
Review: This is an extraordinary, taut, political espionage thriller. It kept me guessing and totally involved. Val Kilmer plays a special ops trainer called in to recover the kidnapped daughter of the President. Her captors just see her as a beautiful blonde and don't know who she is. She's one of the many blondes kidnapped and brought to the Arab gulf states to be a sex slave. Without giving away the plot, I'll just say that on the surface, this appears to be a ho-hum, cookie-cutter film. It isn't. None of the acting is ovedone (well, just one secret service person). Kilmer plays an understated role where he doesn't smile, act cocky and look like a famous actor. This contributes to the believeability to the film. Lesser films require such star quality. Spartan also doesn't rely on gadgets, stunts, car chases or silly fighting. The action isn't non-stop, but well-placed. It caused me to jump a couple of times. This is better than The Recruit, Basic and Spygame, and while less of a spectacle than the last James Bond film, it's more engrossing. This film is on it's second day in Winnipeg, and although its only playing at Polo Park, the theatre was about half empty. It's too bad the studio doesn't believe there is a large enough market for this superb film. by Triniman
14 March 2004
Rating:
Summary: Watch the trailer instead, you'll save 1:39 of your life
Review: We watched the trailer *after* the film, and it was hilarious how it encapsulated the entire plot, much better than the film itself. (...) There could have been a very interesting treatment of what happened next, but instead we saw the end credits. Single-threaded storyline (...), characters and dialog that manage to be both cliche and unrealistic, lack of development makes many of the characters interchangable. In fact, the running commentary by Kilmer reveals that even *he* didn't know who he was playing. We rented this based upon Roger Ebert's "two thumbs way up" review prominently displayed on the box at Blockbuster. I'll never make the mistake of trusting anything he says ever again. He's either senile or on the payroll. Very very little action, most of time is wasted watching "managers" in an office scene. Many long boring actionless, dialogless, scenes such as the minute long shot of a helicopter flying from some forgettable place to another. Thankfully the movie was so easy to mock, no need to wait very long between laughs, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style. Eventually the fast forward button was our best friend, my rule of thumb was to skip over all of the many scenes with Kilmer alone in the frame - they were all slow and pointless. There were maybe 2 or 3 small actors who actually acted, but the principals were flat and emotionless, devoid of personality. Sad because the basic premise has promise, it's just that Mamet avoided each and every potentially interesting aspect of the story. (...)
| 
