The political thriller genre is given a typically oblique David Mamet makeover in the initially intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying "Spartan." Given its world premiere at the Bangkok International Film Festival, where it was the closing-night selection, the picture stars Val Kilmer as a hardened special ops officer who is assigned to track down the kidnapped daughter of a high-ranking government official assumed to be the president, though that distinction is deliberately never made clear. Writer-director Mamet establishes the serious-minded picture's urgent pace from the beginning, dropping the viewer in the middle of a clandestine training exercise overseen by Kilmer's career Secret Service type, the uncompromising Robert Scott.

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