MOVIES: Redbelt (David Mamet, 2008)

Not the best of Mamet's elaborate con-game stories, but not entirely without merit.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Mike Terry, owner of an LA martial-arts school specializing in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (which is, apparently, not the same thing as Japanese jujitsu). Mike is a skilled fighter himself, and has been asked many times to take part in pay-per-view martial arts extravaganzas run by a sleazy promoter (Ricky Jay); he is, however, a deeply idealistic man, and has no interest in sullying his talent on such tacky events. As a result, the school is almost always on the verge of financial crisis.

Attempting to describe the plot at all would be futile, and any attempt would give too much away that should be surprising; it's a complex (though never hard to follow) story involving a naive young attorney (Emily Mortimer), Mike's materialistic wife (Alice Braga) and her bar-owner brother (Rodrigo Santoro), an aging action movie star (Tim Allen), and his shady manager (Joe Mantegna). As is customary in Mamet's con games, surface gestures hide deeper motives and trustworthiness is in short supply.

There are certain problems that almost always arise in con game movies. The biggest of them is that they rely to a tremendous extent on coincidence, or on the villain's ability to predict with perfect accuracy how everyone else will react to a specific situation. The best con game stories -- and I'd include Mamet's movies House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner among them -- juggle their narrative balls swiftly and gracefully enough that you don't really notice those flaws under you're leaving the theater, trying to figure out how all of that happened. That's not the case here; you're aware of the narrative gaps as they arise. Further, the final ten minutes of the movie are a plotting nightmare, a mess of unmotivated behavior and confusing action.

Still, the performances are fine. Chiwetel Ejiofor has the challenge of playing an essentially decent man without coming off as annoyingly sanctimonious, and he does that very well. Tim Allen is surprisingly effective in his small role, so much so that this could be the first step towards reinventing himself as a serious dramatic actor. Mamet regulars Joe Mantegna and Ricky Jay do precisely what they always do in Mamet films, and they are irreplaceable. (One of Mamet's other regulars, his wife Rebecca Pidgeon, is also on hand; fortunately, hers is a very small role, and she's not around long enough to ruin the movie as she often does.)

Not a great movie, but the things that do work work very well indeed, making it worth catching on cable or DVD.