Redbelt

By Mike D'Angelo

Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 4:34 p.m.

In a notable essay he wrote for the Village Voice a couple of months back, playwright and filmmaker David Mamet formally renounced his long-held status as a “brain-dead liberal.” Which is fine, I suppose, given the guy’s privileged degree of wealth and comfort, but I can’t help but think that he’d make more of a difference in the world by renouncing his compulsion to hoodwink his audience. His latest movie, Redbelt, pits a paragon of forthright integrity against the whole damn Machiavellian world, methodically creating a framework in which every chance encounter merely represents yet another opportunity for somebody to fleece you. But this is the first Mamet picture in which the key machinations take place behind the lens.

For the past several years, it seems, Mamet has been a student of Brazilian jujitsu. Redbelt’s hero, accordingly, is a martial-arts instructor by the name of Mike Terry (Ejiofor), whose staccato maxims (“You know the escape”; “Insist on the move”) reflect his personal code of honor—one that doesn’t believe in formal competition. However, Mike’s financial difficulties, plus the sudden appearance in his life of a fearful attorney (Mortimer) in need of self-defense lessons and a suspiciously generous movie star (Allen) who wants Mike to co-produce and serve as fight coordinator for his latest picture, conspire to force him into the ring at last, in a bout that his handlers cheerfully admit has been fixed.

Trouble is, so has Redbelt itself, in which every convoluted twist of the plot is ultimately revealed to be just another means of arriving at the film’s preposterous climax. Instead of the con men of House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner pulling the strings from within, we get Mamet himself weaving Byzantine subplots that ultimately serve no function except to clunkily move the protagonist from point A (don’t wanna) to point B (okay gotta). Which might be forgivable if the big fight scene were genuinely exciting, but while Mamet has a better visual sense than he’s often given credit for, kinetic action remains well beyond his range. Ejiofor invests the silly proceedings with impressive conviction, but like Mike’s pupils, he’s doing battle with one hand tied behind his back.