Warner Brothers doesn’t seem to want you to see Spartan. Afraid that moviegoers would not be able to accept the political implications of David Mamet’s suspense drama, the studio ensured it a quick death, requisitely opened it wide, yet with barely a hint of the fanfare usually afforded the bigger releases week in and week out. Handled with kid-gloves by a studio unsure of what sort of product they had on their hands, Warner apparently decided to Spike it (see also Disney’s handling of Spike Lee’s post-9/11 treatise 25th Hour, and New Line’s debasement of his scorching Bamboozled, both given polite platform releases in less than 500 theaters, a gentle nod, and a glass of milk before bed). Outwardly critical of the moral vacuum of governmental policy, from phantom CIA machinations to the cover-up of administration rhetoric, Spartan plays out like Mamet’s Wag the Dog screenplay had it traded in its venomous wit for more conventional genre bloodletting. Val Kilmer’s cipher “protagonist,” a military commander of questionable ethical practices, unhesitatingly gives himself over to the Secret Service, to play-act his way through an increasingly surreal web that ultimately leads him from the Massachusetts North Shore to a Middle-Eastern slavery and prostitution ring. A purposely hazy and lurching supposition of what would come forth from Washington’s backrooms should the president’s daughter be kidnapped, Spartan ultimately fails to harness its various paranoias into a properly devastating critique—but Mamet’s shadow puppet-theater always provides at least three meals’ worth of gristle to chew on.

The simple set-up gives way to all sorts of Mametian non-sequiturs (structural as well as verbal), integral exposition is left out, and by its finish, all resemblance to the current real-world White House administration dissolves in an overwrought compendium of machismo. Could Spartan honestly be perceived as dangerous? Political filmmaking, regardless of partisan affiliations or the transparency of certain onscreen parallels, has become so nullified that the basic existence of this film sends off warning signals. I can only imagine that a third-act non-revelation—that the fictional President Newton might have known more than he let on regarding his daughter’s disappearance—triggered panic in the publicity department, and eventually led to this lean and mean potboiler, slightly more gripping than the usual studio thriller fodder yet still falling just shy of the bull’s-eye, being quietly swept under the rug. The irony of all this, of course, is that Spartan could only drum up concern in a political climate such as this one, beset as it is by militaristic defense jargon, media censorship hypocrisies, and Mel Gibson.

The far more trenchant Wag the Dog still managed only as much as a blip on the radar upon its Christmas release during the Clintonian late-Nineties, though at the time its fortuitous parody of the image-making of the American war machine took a backseat to its supposedly more relevant commentary on its liberal Prez’s lasciviousness with the young ladies. For all its narrative whimsy and easy Hollywood satire, Wag the Dogended up as one dark little ride into the heart of American complacency—Washington, with a lot of help from Hollywood, hoodwinks the country, those who helped engineer could end up with a bullet in their heads, and the cover-up goes deep, man. Even with its shootings, stabbings, and plot-twist shockeroos, Spartan ultimately seems tame by comparison, a frightening realization considering Wag the Dog’s far more incendiary politics were met in 1997 with unanimous, unconcerned huzzahs. In both films, government is a theatrical concept, a stage on which a series of tableaux are played out by blank-faced puppeteers doing everything they can to avoid waking the American people from their dreams of unblemished democracy. Woody Harrelson’s cameo role in the earlier film, a dangerous convict secretly released from prison to serve as a governmental decoy, is here somewhat recycled as an equally elaborate plot device—and Mamet’s point is basically the same: decisions regarding the nation’s stability are being carried out by literal criminals.

What Wag the Dog intentionally, and thankfully, failed to provide was a leading man. In Spartan, Mamet uses Val Kilmer’s sloe-eyed, purse-lipped tabula rasa to tenuous effect. It may have been a dreadful miscalculation to finally rest the weight of a vaguely sinister backroom exposé onto a single protagonist’s shoulders. As Kilmer discovers in the less-compelling second half that there is a media-satiating cover-up occurring here, he begins to operate in a more generic hero mode, and the film seems to be heading to a sublimely defeatist Chinatown-ish denouement: the political has spiralled out into the personal, yet the two can never be reconciled, dirty deeds will go unpunished, and the hero’s efforts will fail in the face of an impenetrable corruption. Yet Mamet doesn’t quite attain Polanski’s tragic heights; there is a whiff of compromise here that would have been unthinkable in the great political thrillers of the Seventies. Perhaps that is the greatest irony of the studio’s treatment of this ostensible “hot potato”: it’s barely the movie we need right now, but we’ll take whatever we can get—if we can find it.
—MICHAEL KORESKY