Salocin

Spartan

In my many years as a consumer of film media, I have developed a rare skill, considered quite an art in certain circles, of managing to pick the most godawful movies to watch when the urge to stare at a screen suddenly takes me on a weekday night. You could hide the movie on some dark shelf behind the failed action movies of the 70s, and somehow, provided it's recent and awful, I will home in on it like a bunker-buster bomb on a mission of self-destruction.

In a rare trial of this strange talent, I recently rented a movie called Spartan, and I'm happy to say that my mysterious skill has not left me. Not one little bit.

Spartan is the story of a secret service agent (played by Val Kilmer) who speaks as though he's reading his lines off a prompt sheet. Despite this unusual handicap, he's quite highly respected by the marine buddies he frequents, and he hangs out at a training camp where he gives the local cadets a hard time, mostly by not smiling and speaking woodenly without looking at them, which seems to engender yet more respect. He's not the only one with a social handicap.

For reasons that we won't go into, because the movie doesn't either, he gets assigned to a case regarding a missing girl, presumed kidnapped. The way this happens is that he drives his pick-up to a building site, where a builder with a protective helmet gives him a note with the words "stand to" on them. He looks gravely (one might say 'woodenly') into the distance, and a helicopter comes flying out of the night sky to pick him up. This clearly is very mysterious, and remains unexplained for the remainder of the film, the better to deepen the mystery.

He walks into the investigation and is immediately given all of the most important tasks, even though most of the agents on the case don't know who he is, he knows little or nothing about the case, and he's violent with witnesses in a way that makes you wonder whether he was beaten up as a child, and is now doomed to spend the rest of his life passing on the misery he received in the school bathrooms.

Fortunately, everyone who he beats up turns out to be a bad guy, and he eventually manages to screw up the investigation without their help anyway, at which point we wonder what was supposed to be so amazing about this character anyway.

By this time, we're quite bored, so the film takes us to places foreign, strange, and probably soon to be redefined as the axis of something or other, in the hopes of reviving our flagging enthusiasm. Unfortunately, even strange foreign places are drab and boring when the budget is so low that you have to film it all in the same garage, and Val Kilmer is busy doing an impression of Pinnochio, but without the soul of a little boy, just to be different.

If you're still watching at this point, the girl turns out to be the daughter of the potential next president of the united states, and I'm not giving anything away because I think they meant to tell you that at the beginning, but it just kind of slips between the cracks. At least it explains why the secret service is crawling all over the place. After a particularly awful scene involving a secret agent as a surrogate mother and most of the characters being killed off in ways that make the audience care less and less, we come to the climax of the piece, and the film fades to black amidst a soundtrack as dull as the script.