Mamet, wound too tight

When Leonidas, King of Sparta, was asked for military aid, or so David Mamet says the story goes, his regard for his own troops was such that he was prone to sending just one man. A man, no doubt, very much like Robert Scott, the protagonist of the writer-director’s new film, “Spartan.”

As played by Val Kilmer, an actor not known for cuddly characterizations, Scott is an implacable, unstoppable, military machine. A humorless member of an unnamed elite American combat force much given to gnomic pronouncements, he’s able to routinely break grown men like they were toy soldiers. When he says “give me all your magazines,” he’s not talking about Vogue and House and Garden.

Though the works Mamet’s written for others (“The Untouchables,” “The Verdict,” “Wag the Dog”) have had more visibility than his own, the filmmaker has managed over the years to direct nine features. He’s established himself as a Woody Allen/Spike Lee kind of niche player, a cost-effective brand name studios like to associate themselves with for prestige reasons.

Having someone like Scott as the protagonist of a Mamet film is not exactly a change of pace. From the writer-director’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross” through pictures like “House of Games” and “Homicide,” men being intensely masculine and doing whatever it is men do has always been one of his core preoccupations.

In “Spartan,” that continuing concern is joined to the kind of conventional thriller plot involving a president’s missing daughter, white slavery and political chicanery that would not be out of place on an airport paperback rack. It’s an intriguing combination but far from a compelling one.

Mamet has a sharp, unconventional mind and the ability to write dialogue of the “you want to gossip or you want to shoot somebody” variety. So his films, whether they ultimately succeed or not, have more intrinsic interest than the output of the usual studio apparatchiks.

Unfortunately, like many of the works he directs, “Spartan” does not feel like Mamet at the top of his game. Its wheels-within-wheels plot, unable to decide between steeliness and sentiment, ends up rolling off the tracks, and Mamet’s trademark dialogue starts to sound too self-conscious for its own good. Though a more interesting film seems to be in the offing at moments when the plot throws even our hero a curve, they don’t last long enough to add up to anything.

Scott, who refers to himself more than once as “just a worker bee,” is introduced helping run a war games exercise and keeping his distance from the young soldiers who idolize him, possibly because he can afford a custom leather jacket so special it gets its own mention in the credits. “If I want camaraderie,” he tells them, “I’ll join the Masons.”

No sooner do the games wind down than a helicopter materializes to ferry Scott to a late-breaking emergency. Laura Newton (Kristen Bell), the president’s blithe spirit daughter, has apparently been kidnapped, quite possibly by white slavers who don’t yet know who she is.

With just about every macho player on the government payroll rushing hither and yon in honest bewilderment, Scott gets the call from White House operatives Burch and Stoddard (Mamet regulars Ed O’Neill and William H. Macy) to “go off the meter” and do whatever it takes to get Laura Newton back. He’s joined by Curtis (Derek Luke), a kid so new on the block he has to be told to “keep your mouth shut and your eyes open.”

Mamet knows his way around written dialogue, but he’s often had unusual ideas about how it should be spoken. He allowed his actors to recite the words naturally in “State and Main,” with delicious results, but here he backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

That artificiality spills over into “Spartan’s” already far-flung plot and makes it seem even more unlikely, removing any sense of genuine jeopardy from a story that never had an abundance of the stuff in the first place.

The risk of having a nonstandard guy try to tell a standard story is that his style works against plausibility -- he may not be able to do enough to make us believe. King Leonidas’ Spartans may have been tough, but, as the famous losing Battle of Thermopylae proved, even they couldn’t do the impossible.

*

‘Spartan’

MPAA rating: R, for violence and language

Times guidelines: Violence is not lingered over.

Val Kilmer...Robert Scott

Derek Luke...Curtis

William H. Macy...Stoddard

Ed O’Neill...Burch

Kristen Bell...Laura Newton

Warner Bros. Pictures and Franchise Pictures present an Apollo Media/Apollo Promedia/Quality International co-production, in association with Signature Pictures, released by Warner Bros. Director David Mamet. Producers Art Linson, Moshe Diamant, Elie Samaha, David Bergstein. Executive producers Frank Huebner, Tracee Stanley, James Holt. Screenplay by Mamet. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia. Editor Barbara Tulliver. Costume designer Shay Cunliffe. Music Mark Isham. Production designer Gemma Jackson. Art director Christopher Tandon. Set decorator Susan Emshwiller. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

In general release.