Despite coming and going with nary a blip, Spartan is a smart, hard, fast, intelligent thriller that Malaya and I enjoyed quite a bit.  I don't think it would have been a big hit no matter how much promotion it received, but such a quality film deserved better than this one got.

Spartan
Script/Story: 7
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 5
Eye Candy: 4
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7

I'm sort of surprised that I didn't give this one a higher score, since I remembered it fondly, but the more I think about it the less it stands out in my memory. Its strength is the plot and story, which are hard, fast, and very smart. The acting is entirely adequate, and I was involved and interested as the movie progressed. On the other hand, it's not a whole lot of fun, there are no laughs, not much action, and it's not pretty to look at.  Very workmanlike, rather than splashy in any way. Sort of anti-Bruckheimer, in style.

March 15, 2004

(The following review contains no spoilers.  Which is not something I can say about any of the other Spartan reviews that I've read.)

Yes, Spartan!  The movie! After I blogged about it at excessive length, two days in a row last week, I was pretty much obligated to go and sit through it. And so I did. Malaya and I caught a matinee over the weekend, or at least we tried to. They have matinee pricing until 6 on weekdays, but we had to pay $9 a head for the 5:25 showing on Saturday at the Walnut Creek Century Cinema. Bleh.

On top of that Malaya was hungry and wanted to get food, and I wasn't and didn't. Well, I wanted to, but the prices ruled that out, movie theater food being priced on a par with room service in a hospital.  On an airplane.

 So how was Spartan? It wasn't great, or at least not greatly-enjoyable, but it was a pretty good movie. We enjoyed it. Well made, interesting characters, complex and intricate plot, etc.  I wished I'd gone in without having seen the trailer or read any reviews for it, since then I would have been playing along with the characters in it when they think someone is dead, or are trying to figure out a loose end or follow a trail, etc. Instead I knew how pretty much everything was going to go, or at least knew something that was going to happen later on.  There was still some suspense, since I didn't know every plot twist, but it would have been more fun if I'd been totally in the dark.

Of course the only reason I went to see it is that I had read a bunch of reviews and they all said it was pretty good, and I liked the trailer once I watched it again. So I wouldn't have seen it at all if I hadn't been pre sold on it, and the pre-selling required plot details and other information.  Catch-22.

So the movie. It's smart, dark, harsh, and intelligent. Lots of people die, good guys and bad guys, and it's very real life with the violence coming suddenly and shockingly. Two guys walking along... one drops dead with no warning whatsoever. If you like your movies very Hollywood style, with everything explained and 

It starts off immediately, with things happening right away and no fucking around. There is very little exposition; you learn things as the characters learn them, or learn them from viewing what's happening.  A woman has been kidnapped, or has vanished, the bodyguard left his post and allowed it to happen, and the vanished person is obviously very important since dozens of government agents are in a lather trying to figure out where she went, who took her, if she's run off, etc. As the viewer, you are plunged right into the heart of this, and the camera is an observer in a command center that's being put together on the fly and is understaffed and chaotic and under a severe time crunch. You get a sense of urgency, you see how good Val Kilmer's character is at what he does, and from there the action takes off and never lets up.

Well, I use "action" in a non-Hollywood way.  It's not the action of cheesy car chases and mindless shootouts and people running around doing stupid stuff with lots of quick camera cuts. Spartan's action is more like a rapid series of key events, many of which go very wrong or at least differently than the viewer and the characters expect them to go. I didn't count, but there must be 20 different sets in the film, where key events take place. Things are constantly happening and moving along rapid fire, characters come and go, the body count increases in all the wrong ways, and as a viewer you're just trying to keep up with things, rather than being 5 steps ahead, as is the case in your average brain-dead thriller.

It's not a movie to see if you like traditional explanation-heavy, stupid-hero type Hollywood movies. You need to enjoy chaos, confusion, clusterfucks, and characters who do things for their own reasons and agendas, rather than just to advance the plot and to be the hero types you always see in movies but never in real life. It's also got a happy ending, sort of, that may actually be a depressing, unhappy ending, depending on how you look at it. It's logical and consistent with the characters and the rest of the film, at least, which is more than most movies can say.

It reminded me of Ronin, which was also written by David Manet (he wrote and directed Spartan). That film was faster and had far less plot, but was similar in the brutal, shocking action and dialogue, and both films were populated by tough, internalized characters who give away nothing of themselves.  Malaya could see the comparison, but oddly enough she hated Ronin, while I liked it mildly, and she liked Spartan a lot, while I liked it, but less than she did.

There's a scene in Ronin where DeNiro and the IRA woman are in the car and have to pretend to kiss to disguise themselves from the cops.  They do so, out of duty and professionalism, and after the kiss and the cops pass by both of them look at each other, look around, adjust their clothing, etc. And then a moment later the woman leaps back onto DeNiro and they kiss, and they really kiss the second time, with passion and desire.

Nothing like that happens in Spartan; in fact there's no kissing at all.  But it's the suddenness of things, and how real they feel when they happen that makes it work, for me.  People try hard, act nobly, and then they get cut down out of the blue, and that's it. No miracle recoveries or slow fades to black with a fade back in in a hospital with a loved one nearby.  The other characters in Spartan suffer losses, but they have to just keep on going, leaving the dead where they fall and saving their grief for a later day.

Not that it's all about dying, but the dying was handled so much differently in this movie than in most Hollywood fare that it's the thing that most stood out in my mind. I feel influenced by it, somewhat.  I've handled death in my stories in various ways, sometimes quick and harsh and unforgiving, like in Ronin and Spartan, but not always. And I'm not always going to do it this way, or any other way, but after all, variety is the spice of life. And death.

See Spartan if you like to be challenged, both in plot and events, and you don't mind cynical and unhappy things happening in movies. But you'd better hurry, or wait for the DVD since it's only on 800 screens, and it's had zero press, and it's not going to make much money or stick around for long.

I'd give it about a 6/10 in terms of being enjoyable, and a 8/10 in terms of quality of movie and plot and characters and such.  I can easily imagine some viewers who would agree with me on the quality rating, even while they hated the movie and wanted those two hours of their life back.  But that's how it goes with hard-edged films like this one; opinions will differ, sometimes strongly.

Pre-Movie Discussion

March 11, 2004

Spartan!  This movie is opening this weekend, with approximately zero fan fare. And no, it's not the prequel to Troy.

I'd seen the trailer at some point in the past, hadn't thought much of it, and hadn't heard a word about it or seen a single TV ad. In fact I'm only talking about it now since I checked Rotten Tomatoes to see how the crap released last weekend was reviewed, and saw Spartan as a title coming up this weekend, and saw that it had a "fresh" review total.  So I clicked it, and then vaguely remembered the trailer, and out of curiosity, checked out a few of the positive reviews.  And they make it sound pretty damn good. More on that in a bit.

I also looked up the the trailer again, and while it convinced me that I wanted to see the film, I wouldn't really recommend watching it, if you're already sold on giving this one a try.  It's a bit spoilery, since you know (if you read any of the reviews) that there are betrayals and plot twists galore.  And while the trailer keeps moving and doesn't have bad voice over narration or anything like that, it shows various people shooting at each other, apparently late in the movie, and that sort of gives things away.  I'm not going to say who, or say anything in this discussion that could be considered a spoiler, primarily since Malaya is now interested in seeing the movie, and she hates spoilers about some things.  I haven't quite figured out what things, since she obsessively reads the news about the upcoming books Feast of Crows and Song of Suzannah, and constantly has to slap herself to keep from spilling the spoilers she's read about them to me, since I know I'm going to read the books, and don't want to know anything about them.  I'm not even going to read any reviews, or the dust jackets, if I can help it.

Anyway, the Spartan trailer gives away some stuff, but if you're not sure you're going to see the movie, or don't want to, you might as well watch it; it might win you over.  It (the movie and the trailer) look very stark and hard and harsh.  As the reviews have said, it's like the TV show 24 with more guts and less absurd plot twists, or like one of those Tom Clancy spy thrillers without all of the Boy Scout rah rah for America stuff and glorification of spies and secret agents and authority figures. 

As for what got me interested enough to watch the trailer again, the reviews are positive, and interesting. Check them out, since even the negative ones seem to give some props for interesting and non-conventional film making.  Well, most of them. They enjoyed it, and in a good way.  It's not that they wanted to like it and thought it was just okay, like they would a new movie by Spielberg.  They were challenged, they liked how hard and polished and fierce it was, they liked that the story was only revealed over time, that you knew less than the characters and had to think to keep up, etc.  All qualities that make me want to see it, as well as dooming it to almost certain commercial disaster. (As if Val Kilmer's increasingly-blotchy presence alone wasn't enough to ensure that fate.)

A few review quotes.

Internet Reviews:

As Mamet peels away more and more of his onion of a plot, you may be looking at your watch, but not for the reason that usually causes you to get acquainted with your timepiece in the dark of a theater. You may be thinking, as I did, that you don't want this to end. If Mamet ever wants to turn SPARTAN into a miniseries, I'm there. And, if the average screenwriter had just one tenth of Mamet's talent, movies would be a whole lot more fun.

Philadelphia Weekly:

The first rule of Hollywood thrillers is that characters are always extra careful to describe everything that's already occurred in the movie thus far to each other, just to reiterate the obvious for the audience's benefit.

The great thing about Spartan is that it's populated by folks who couldn't give a fuck what you make of the plot. They're all too busy doing their jobs to drop everything and recap for lazy viewers.

Everybody in this film already knows a hell of a lot more than we do going in, so the audience is stuck playing catch-up for the next couple hours. Whether you find this tactic annoying or invigorating is a matter of personal preference. But speaking as someone who has his intelligence insulted on a weekly basis by modern movies, there's something thrilling about a picture that boxes your ears and forces you to sit up and pay attention.

Spliced Wire:

It's a movie in which intellect trumps exposition to the point that most of the characters aren't clearly identified, making all of them seem more shadowy and dangerous. The story counts on your ability to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions about evidence trails, incidents, alibis, motives and intentions -- then pulls those conclusions out from under you more than once with substantial surprises that make you think even harder. And it has a palpable atmosphere of pressure-cooker urgency, kept doggedly in check by government agents for whom eye-on-the-prize callousness is compulsory.

Just this afternoon, Malaya was commenting about how long it's been since we went to see a movie, which is entirely a function of it being so long since there were any movies released that we wanted to go see. We'll probably catch this one at a matinee this weekend, and we also keep telling each other we should join up at the soulsucking Blockbuster, just so we could rent some of the recent titles that weren't intriguing enough to drop $8 on in the theaters, but would be worth $5 (or whatever Blockbuster rentals cost these days) to see at home.  Stuff like Mystic River and Lost in Translation and School of Rock. Well, maybe not that last one.

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