Redbelt

So I lied again, unintentionally of course, and haven't been out to see a new movie. Things don't always work out the way you plan, and people don't always do what they say they will. It doesn't matter; I decided I'm going to review any movie I see on DVD that I feel is worth writing about, good or bad, so at least I'll be writing. And today, that movie worth writing about is David Mamet's Redbelt.

I hated it. I started out thinking this movie was maybe pretty good but not quite as together as it should be, but by the time is was over I was angry for having seen it. Has Mamet written & directed some incredible films? Sure. Do I like some of them? Absolutely. I really like State & Main, and Heist is a guilty pleasure - it's enjoyable and entertaining and fun to watch and is certainly not what I'd call a brilliant piece of cinema...but it's a good movie. Redbelt is so far off the mark, I don't even know where to start.

How about we start with Mamet. Whenever anyone talks about his writing, they first mention the dialogue. And throughout his career he's written some great dialogue. None of that made it into this script. Here's a small sample:

"You ain't got no bouncer?"
"Just weekends now."
"Officer Joe?"
"Joey the cop? Quit."
"Why'd Joe quit?"
"Hold on a second."
"Officer Joe, why'd he quit?"
"What?"
"Why'd Joe quit?"
"'Cause Bruno wasn't payin' him. They never paid him."
"They never paid him?"

Half the movie is like that...all sorts of repetitive dialogue, and people repeating things as a question. I kept waiting for someone to spout off, something like "What the fuck did I just say? Why do you keep repeating what I say with a fuckin' question mark on the end of it?" But no one did. This is not good dialogue, because it's neither interesting nor entertaining, and it has to be one or the other if it's not going to be realistic. And that little snippet quoted above isn't even the whole conversation; I left out the part with another guy interrupting them, talking about sleight-of-hand magic as he's doing it, which, gee, you think might be important somehow later on in the story?

Speaking of the story, it's a big mess. Like all Mamet films, there's some kind of long con, a grand scheme that ties up the hero in a big knot and we're supposed to hope he finds a way to untie it - only in this movie, there's no point to what they're doing. Call this a spoiler if you like, but apparently a whole bunch of people wanted to get this one guy to fight on the undercard of a mixed martial arts championship so they could fix the fight without him knowing and have him win...but if all they wanted was a fixed fight, why go through the trouble of forcing Mr. Honest Goody-Goody into debt so he'd go against his principles and enter a competition? They had their plan in place to fix all the fights, so why the big scheme? Why involve this guy in the first place? Pointless.

There's an incident early in the story when a woman accidentally fires a police officer's own gun at him, breaking a window. Supposedly this is what sets the whole story in motion, but the entire sequence is so ridiculously staged & shot that nothing which follows it is at all believable. The woman even picks up the ejected shell casing and hands it to the officer - which anyone would do in that situation, naturally! And of course this puts her fingerprints on it, but that won't be an issue later in the story, will it?

The main character just happens to see things that clue him in to the scam being run on him, to the fixed fights, and any viewer with at least half a brain should be asking "Why are these people doing these things right then?" Why is the sleight-of-hand magician "practicing" in front of a mirror in his dressing room with the door open, doing the very same trick he expertly performed right in front of the main character earlier in the movie? So we the audience will realize it was all a setup? Isn't that just a little too convenient, story-wise? Isn't Mamet supposed to be better than this? Shouldn't anyone making this kind of movie be better than this?

Considering this is meant to be a fight movie, the climactic scene involving our hero and his strongest opposition is one of the most boring movie fights I've ever seen. And all he was trying to do was get to the ring and tell everyone the fights were fixed. Just get up to the ring! But the champion, who's agreed to have his own fight fixed, stands in his way. At least I think it was the champion; a lot of minor characters are never properly introduced. Anyway, he's got to fight the champion in order to get to the microphone and tell everyone why he dropped out of his own scheduled fight, but everyone ends up just watching him fight the champion down on the floor instead of in the ring.

So he finally wins this incredibly dull fight and gets into the ring and just stands there, until his mentor, who just happened to be in the crowd, comes up and gives him the red belt, of which there is apparently only one, though we're never told what it's for, or why the old guy carries it around with him, and the movie is over. Sorry to spoil the ending, but if you're reading this far I should hope you decided not to see the movie. We're meant to assume the red belt is given to the most honorable something-or-other, or the master, or some big shot who's somehow better or more important than anyone else. But what it really means, who knows? And who cares. The whole movie is worthless.

The actors are good, but what does it matter when their words and actions are so ridiculous? Director of photography Robert Elswit won an Oscar for his previous film, There Will Be Blood, but Mamet has the most annoying habit in this film of framing many compositions so an object or person is obstructing the view of whatever or whomever we're meant to be looking at. I don't know if that's a conscious choice and it's supposed to mean something, or merely the result of a haphazard shooting method, but either way it's really annoying and doesn't serve a purpose. A good director who composes shots with obstructed views does it in a way that doesn't annoy the viewer's eye and actually conveys meaning - check out Wong Kar Wai's In The Mood For Love for a prime example - but here it's just crap filmmaking.

The worst part of all this is the DVD extras, which is full of people talking about how brilliant David Mamet is, the great dialogue, the layered storytelling....people, reputation has to be maintained, okay? Past work means nothing on current projects. Just because it's Mamet doesn't mean it's great. It has to be great on its own. And this falls far, far short.