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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 4/28/08)

Okay, I know what many of you might be thinking: A David Mamet martial arts movie? WTF? Or, if you know a little more about the picture, maybe you're thinking: A David Mamet movie centered on a martial arts school? WTF? And so on. The more you know, or think you know, about the movie, the more you might be inclined to think, WTF?

But do not fear. Or maybe I should say, do not fear too much. Because, by my sights, the first 74 minutes of this 99 minute picture constitute Mamet's best effort as a film writer/director since, well, maybe, his indelible film writing/directing debut, 1987's House of Games. Now, as you may have inferred, that is not to deny that there is a falloff, and that the falloff takes place not long after the 74th minute. And yes... that is true. But, by my sights, it's not nearly as egregious a falloff as the one that completely sunk Mamet's last film as writer/director, 2004's Spartan. For whatever its flaws, Redbelt offers up a good deal of Mametian red meat while also trying to break out of some of the strictures that Mamet's erected around his own work.

For one thing, Redbelt... well, now that I think of it, I can't really reveal the particular strictures that the picture's trying to break out of without dropping some spoilers. Suffice it to say that when Mamet likens Redbelt's protagonist, martial arts instructor Mike Terry (Ejiofor, giving a performance that's physically and emotionally stunning even by this magnificent actor's already high standard), to a samurai, he's not kidding. Noble and upstanding to a fault, or perhaps several, this is a Mamet protagonist an audience can root wholeheartedly for. As the film opens, he's dropping some ancient science to his jujutsu students, but he's doing it with language, and in a cadence that ought to satisfy the most dyed-in-the-wool Mamet fan. "Who imposes the terms of the battle imposes the terms of the peace," he notes. "Improve the position," he repeats like a mantra. We can feel Mamet's pleasure in the language of the fight, and we feel at home. As his training session is interrupted by a freaked-out woman (Mortimer) who has a decidedly weird interaction with a student of Mike who also happens to be a cop (Martini), we feel a couple of tumblers fall into place. Mamet's telling us to pay attention, just as he did in the opening scenes of Games. Subsequent payoffs, as Mike deals with the dissatisfaction of his girlfriend (Braga), the tempting attentions of a Hollywood star and his manager (Allen and Mantegna) and the machinations of a greed-headed martial-arts fights promoter (Jay) and more, are going to be nasty as all get out and finally lead back to the straightforward-enough-seeming exchanges of the opening. And all these circumstances are going to take Mike to a very bad place, where he's going have to say no, in thunder, to the forces that are trying to screw him over.

And it's at that point, with a clumsy attempt to construct a Rocky-esque finale, that the film goes substantially south. By this point, one has possibly invested enough in Ejiofor's Mike to actually buy the absurd standoff that climaxes the film. But not to sound like one of Hitchcock's least favorite movie watchers — the so-called "Plausibles" — but there are one or two very minor fixes which Mamet could have applied to Redbelt's climax, which would have made it play so much less eye-rollingly that, well, this viewer felt personally frustrated. "What the hell happened," a fellow viewer and I said to each other on the way out of the screening, having been buoyed in all the right ways by the film's first three-quarters. Heck. Those three-quarters are good enough for Redbelt to be provisionally recommendable. But don't say I didn't warn you.

— Glenn Kenny