Great Film overall

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

I was tempted to run screaming from the room after viewing the first twenty or so minutes of The Spanish Prisoner due to its less than desirable bunch of actors. However, I was intrigued in spite of myself and ended up finishing the film. A man is hired by his boss to work on a top- secret project and espionage ensues. The writing was phenomenal, in my opinion. I would have preferred to read this as a novel as the plot is only slightly predictable and there are so many twists that no one could figure it out entirely. The acting is simply sophomoric. I think David Mamet should fire the person who did the casting. However, the writing was good enough to balance out the atrocity of the acting, hence my rating of 5.

David Mamet can write. There's no two ways about it. He can write with such a beautiful and graceful cadence that any conversation, no matter how dreary or dull, can sound like a poetic work of art. In The Spanish Prisoner he shows off quite a bit, but hey, doesn't he have the right to do so? The Spanish Prisoner is about a naive inventor named Joseph Ross who has come up with a formula called "The Process" that is the key to global success for the company that employs him. But holding a secret this significant and this important has its drawbacks, and Ross quickly discovers that as an elaborate scheme unfolds before him in order to get ahold of "The Process." This scheme is full of twists, turns, and countless surprises, making for a film that is a lot of fun to watch play out, but be prepared to follow the many trails as the film spins out of control towards the end.Now, I said David Mamet is a great writer, and The Spanish Prisoner is an excellently written film, it's just... different. The writing style has a more poetic cadence to it rather than the raw and realistic style of some of his other scripts like Glenngary Glen Ross, or House of Games. The style of the dialouge and its delivery takes some getting used to and there always seem to be those moments where I thought to myself, I bet that line looked a lot better on paper. Regardless, the script is full of sharp wit and crisp cadence, and the depth of the story as a whole is very impressive.In many ways I do feel like this would have been a lot better as a book or even a stage play, as some of the film aspects didn't translate perfectly. There's nothing truly bad about this film and it really is a great film that is a joy to watch, there are just those odd moments. Those moments, for the most part, just come and go and you forget about them after a while, as you become more enticed by the bigger picture unfolding masterfully before your eyes. One thing I consistently couldn't forgive, though, was Rebecca Pidgeon. I feel like she's most of the reason I felt the delivery of certain lines that otherwise would have been ingenious, were delivered a little rocky. She is simply just not good in this film, which is unfortunate considering her character is very important to the film. In fact, every character is important in this film because it is all such an elaborate maze constructed so well by Mamet.The rest of the cast does a great job. Campbell Scott plays the protagonist and does a decent job overall. He has a lot of those so-so lines that don't quite make me cringe, but instead force me to just shrug them off and move on. The most notable performance would have to be Steve Martin playing a straight man role. To see the white haired buffoon who I loved so much in The Jerk go an entire film without delivering anything close to a joke or visual gag was very odd, but also impressive. Martin does an excellent job as the elusive con man, Jimmy Dell, and he has some of the best conversations of the whole film.The Spanish Prisoner really is a great film. It's a poetic work of art from Mr. Mamet, albeit a little pretentious. But it's nothing that really gets in the way. The only thing that really does deter from this films excellence would have to be Rebecca Pidgeon in her bland and forced acting, making some of the lines in this film not as great as they were when Mamet wrote them out on paper. Solving the twisted mystery of this film is so much fun, and everything is pulled off very well. It is definitely one of Mamet's better films and it is an excellent display of the talent he has as a screenwriter.

There are many kinds of cinemas. This one is one of the top examples of story telling. You won't notice any camera work, any music (was there any?) etc. You are just absorbed by how well the story is told. Trust me, within 5 minutes (though you won't get to understand what's exactly happening there in such short time) you'll be absorbed. Even Steve Martin is watchable.Also perhaps the only movie (at least for grown-ups) with no swearing. At all. Except for a short scene showing a stabbed body, this is a film for everybody (if the youths can get it). In this regard, the exact opposite of "Glengarry Glen Ross".I find it very strange that the less people have to say, the more they shout and swear. As if even their ordinary words require some kind of 'strengthening' to be taken seriously. You can't just say something is good, because, you see, nobody would take that. However, when saying "something is f... good", you suddenly receive all the attention you've wanted, and they even believe you. Going further down that road, I suppose one day we have to kill our loved ones, to convince them that, indeed, we love them. Exaggerating? Really? Remember LOST TV series and its throughout gratuitous violence, like the scene when Locke, burdened with the memory of something bad in his life, being hit with the car by Desmond, so that he would let go? Figure that out: I care so much for my friend that when I see him troubled by something I hit him with my car (violently, by the way) so that he would let go and start smiling again.Back to the movie at hand, I'll have to warn you that after seeing this one, you won't anymore enjoy your daily movie rubbish. That happens, you know, when you have the courage to open up your eyes.In the same evening, I also saw 'Harrison Bergeron' (1995), another story-teller, and now I'm having trouble finding MOVIES (you know, the ones that you can watch beyond their first 10 minutes).So, if you're comfortably numb (as Pink Floyd put it a few decades back), stay away from movies like this one.

It seems that Mamet is one of the Wunderkinder to many, who can do no wrong on stage or screen. Bleh. I've seen a few of the films he's written and, yeah, they tend to be very good. I barely remember "Heist"but vaguely recall that it seemed to go nowhere pretty quickly; I'm sure I enjoyed it to at least some extent merely as a result of the presence of Gene Hackman, one of those actors who elevates anything he's in solely by virtue of his presence. Unfortunately, Mr Hackman wasn't in "The Spanish Prisoner," though I think the main problem here is that a real director wasn't directing the thing.Early on in the piece I was trying to reconcile what I've always heard Mamet was noted for -- realistic dialog -- with the garbage I was hearing the actors on screen parrot. 'Parrot' being, given Mamet's way of working with actors (well, 'dictating to' is probably more correct), definitely the word. Part of the problem was quoting ancient Phoenician poets or whatever the hell much of the early dialog consisted of, a trait absent in 99% of the world's relatively sane population and less convincing when the direction comes from a man who seems (understandable, from a writer's perspective, as it may be) a total control freak when it comes to actors delivering his dialog. The fact that Ricky Jay (who, though a cool dude, is a very obviously limited and self-conscious 'actor') delivers some of these lines probably has less to do with their failure than Mamet's helming the affair.I mean, I've spent my fair share of time in some quite diverse subcultures and seen a fair bit of the world, spending a great many years in academia and the like as well as, in common with probably most Americans, in the middle of crowds of people who appear to be Method actors auditioning for "Idiocracy 2," and neither intelligentsia nor your basic Joe Halfwits talk anything like Mamet's model in this film. Oh, so the dialog's STYLIZED? Well, whoop-de-doo; if it's stylized, maybe he didn't stylize it ENOUGH because, really, it's not that interesting. And its delivery in this film is pretty uniformly stilted, wooden, and unconvincing. That's both the fault of the words themselves and of their delivery, but in this case I think we can deflect the blame for that away from the actors (well, most of them) and toward the Director who rules delivery of his sacred dialog with an iron fist. The whole also feels very _stagey_, as in old Dave forgetting or not knowing that film is inherently a different kind of medium than stage performance.I have the feeling that many who've reviewed this film are praising Mamet because it's the done thing to do. That the emperor's clothes are, at best, somewhat threadbare is of no apparent concern. The plot's interesting enough, though largely predictable fairly early on (and I am one who tends to let myself get immersed in a good movie, who's not ashamed that he didn't see the twists coming in films like "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense") and suffering from a tendency toward hammering us over the head with clues, whether real or false. Overall, I think, if this film's any indication then Mamet's work is at its best when directed by someone else. Obviously I have little on which to base this (like I said, I barely remember "Heist" and this one's cured me of any tendency to want to rush out to watch any further Mamet-directed films) but from watching other films for which he only has writer's credit I get the impression that his dialog and plots are far more effective in the hands of directors (and editors) who feel free to play a little more fast and loose with those structures and with actors who're working without metronomes.Sure, some actors may be thrilled to speak Mamet's words but I know a lot of actors would probably hate working with someone who demanded such absolute control over what was coming out of an actor's mouth. There's inherently a conflict between those who make the film and those who write it, but this film's one indication of how much weaker a film can be when the writer's vision is all that matters. Forcing stutters, incomplete sentences and repetition is NOT the magic key to writing realistic dialog and, anyway, a competent actor (or a halfway-competent actor under competent direction) should be able to improvise such realistic dialog delivery around the lines on the screenplay that, yeah, more often than not probably ARE too clean and neat to reflect real dialog. Mamet's a good writer, sometimes, but the fact that he's recognized that real speech includes stops and starts and tangents doesn't mean he's qualified to make a film that's any more realistic than average and when he does give such a try and fails it's a cop-out to claim that the reason it's not realistic is because it's "stylized," or "hyper-realistic," or that perhaps we just don't understand and couldn't begin to fathom the genius of the man.I've seen worse -- the recent "The Marine" still stands proudly high as one of the worst films I've seen, largely because I probably ruled out a lot more worthy candidates before I actually tried to watch them -- but this film's a bit of a dud, largely because it's mostly just a non-event and even the climaxes are anticlimactic. The pity is that it's one that probably could have been three or four times as interesting, suspenseful, and engaging if directed by any of the directors who've made successes out of other Mamet scripts. At the very least, it'd have been nice if the movie was as interesting as the blurb on its DVD case...Did you...? Ahhh... Yes, I...yes, I said that. I did. But...well...never mind. Fishes fly hale, more's the pity.