Spartan

Val Kilmer has clearly not been one of the critics' favorite actors of late. But David Mamet is certainly one of their favorite writers. And, in the case of Spartan, writing clearly trumps acting. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gives it a four-star review, writing that Mamet works like a magician who uses words instead of cards ... who gets you all involved in his story about the King, the Queen and the Jack, while the whole point is that there's a rabbit in your pocket. Eric Harrison in the Houston Chronicle puts it this way: Both [Mamet] and his characters specialize in sleights-of-hand. Nothing is as it seems. And A. O. Scott in the New York Times offers a similar metaphor, writing that Mamet's script is a vigorous and engrossing genre exercise that manages the difficult trick of being both logically meticulous and genuinely surprising. Washington Post critic Desson Thomson even has some kind words for Kilmer, who, he writes, seems to be making a positive mid-course correction in his career. But Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes that while the film starts out promisingly it quickly sinks. Part of the problem, he says, is Kilmer's monotonous performance and his inability to give the playwright's distinctive dialogue the kind of staccato delivery it requires to work.