Redbelt
In his latest turn as writer-director, playwright David Mamet tries his hand at a different kind of con game- namely, the Hollywood idea that an underdog story can generate real resonance as a fight for honor without going the way of “Rocky” sentimentality. He’s only marginally successful, but it’s good enough for me. The film may not have the punch of “The Spanish Prisoner” (a profoundly underrated thriller) or “State and Main” (a spot-on Hollywood satire), but Mamet’s touch is still there, starting with the central performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a character actor who only has kept getting better in movies ranging from “Melinda & Melinda” to “Serenity” to “Inside Man” and “Talk to Me,” among many others.
Here, Ejiofor bleeds intensity and soul into the role of Mike Terry, a Gulf War veteran who is now running a jujitsu Academy in L.A. which is losing money- his wife (Alica Braga) is sick of living in debt as she runs the numbers- but turning out students with a profound sense of honor (namely, a cop movingly played by Max Martini). But an unhappy occurrence after hours involving a cop and a frenzied lawyer (Emily Mortimer, who digs deep to find her character’s strength buried underneath her insecurity) leads Mike down a winding road of betrayal and dishonor that forces him to question his own sense of honor when everything he believes in is falling apart around him.
Mamet has an uncanny knack of populating his movies with rich characters played by richer actors, be they character actors like Ejiofor and Mamet stand-by Ricky Jay (as a sleazy fight promoter) or better known actors like Joe Mantegna and Tim Allen, in his best live-action performance yet on the big screen as an action star (Mantegna is his agent) who runs into Terry during a bar fight and later asks him to be a producer on the war movie he’s working on. But as always with Mamet, nothing is as it seems, and the con is always on. How the pieces fall into place in this one may not be as effortlessly as they do in earlier Mamet movies (though the film does stand above the ordinary likes of “Heist” and “Spartan” in the Mamet canon), and seem to have more to do with coincidence than cunning plot construction, but by the time Terry is taking on a mixed-martial-arts champion outside of the ring in a fight for honor, you can’t deny that Mamet has you in his corner. One thing you can always say about Mamet and Ejiofor is that even if they aren’t taking big risks, they never sell out for the easy sell. That along makes “Redbelt” one worth fighting for.
