Spartan

A military officer (Val Kilmer) working in a top-secret special operations force is sent to find the missing teenage daughter of a big-time government official and uncovers a white slavery ring. It’s impossible to describe this story, government corruption and all, without producing a flood of cliches, yet writer-director David Mamet seems to regard it as mere fodder for another of his closed-universe genre exerciseseither that or he’s trying to lure Arnold Schwarzenegger back to Hollywood. The heroes (Kilmer, Derek Luke) are all totally good, the villains (Ed O’Neill, William H. Macy) are all totally bad, and the macho one-liners are sufficiently adolescent to produce the desired snickers. I tried very hard to imagine I was somewhere else. R, 106 min. (JR)

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