REDBELT

Mamet's fight for relevancy

By DAVID WILDMAN

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Screenwriter and director David Mamet has become a distinctive presence looming larger than any actors or plotline he chooses to deploy. This can be a problem. He tends to turn every location into Mamet-land, which is what the inside of John Malkovich's head was like in Being John Malkovich—every character a self-consciously crafted image of its creator. With Redbelt, his signature quirky dialogue and convoluted storytelling has really gotten out of hand, grabbing a choke hold of the film and rendering it a hopeless self-parody.

Things have been going downhill lately for the genius who brought us the mind-blowingly cutthroat Glengarry Glen Ross in 1992. By 2000 he was shitting out garbage like State and Main, an example of how awful Mamet is when he's trying to be funny. His last film was the inexcusable Edmond, which died by its own stagy hysterics. With Redbelt he's trying to address serious questions about the nature of competition and greed, but this film turns out to be hilarious in ways Mamet never intended.

As much as the screenwriter/director attempts to disguise it, the story is at its core just another take on Rocky. It stars the estimable Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry, a jujitsu instructor who believes that the act of fighting is sacred and should never take place in organized competition. That said, you know from minute one he will eventually end up kicking the crap out of someone in an arena setting. The entire film is a complex Rube Goldberg device leading to that inevitability.

His hot Brazilian wife Sondra (Alice Braga) helps run his martial arts studio while trying to keep her own clothing design business afloat. She has two brothers: one, a famous martial arts fighter from Brazil, and another, who runs a local bar and promotes fights on the side. What happens in the film is like a long run-on sentence: A lawyer named Laura Black (Emily Mortimer) inexplicably stumbles into Terry's studio in a panic, tussles with a cop training there, officer Joe Ryan (Max Martini), causing her to accidentally shoot his gun out the window, forcing Terry to go to his brother-in-law's bar to ask for money, where he beats up some thugs picking on celebrity Chet Frank (Tim Allen—no shit) who thanks Terry by hiring him as a fight instructor and co-producer for a film he's shooting; Frank's sleazy manager (Joe Mantegna) gives Terry an expensive watch that he then passes along to financially struggling officer Ryan, who then tries to pawn the watch and gets suspended because it's hot, leading to ...

You get the idea. Mamet has concocted a busy, complex machine that eats characters up to move forward, promptly forgetting about them (e.g., Terry's wife disappears for half the movie and winds up in the final scene). Meanwhile, they all struggle with his stilted dialogue. Ejiofor looks especially silly as he dutifully stops and starts sentences and mechanically repeats phrases with no change of inflection. The worst offender of all is Ricky Jay, one of the filmmaker's usual suspects, playing a fight promoter who comes off like a huge Mamet muppet, causing untold amounts of unintentional hilarity.

Still, the film is entertaining despite the flaws, and Ejiofor deserves some accolades for getting through it relatively unscathed. Maybe I've got Mamet all wrong. Maybe he really is making fun of himself, and the laughs were all intended. Perhaps he's entered into the realm inhabited by the likes of William Shatner where he realizes he's the biggest joke going. His next writing/directing project is listed as Joan of Bark: The Dog that Saved France. Makes you wonder.

REDBELT

RATED | R

OPENS | 5.9.08