Spartan



In Spartan (2004) Val Kilmer plays Robert Scott, a super secret service agent called upon to find the President’s missing daughter. The theory is that she may have been kidnapped, and because she had her distinctive red hair dyed blonde earlier in the day the kidnappers may not know who they have. Scott finds the girl’s boyfriend, who had a fight with her because he thought the hair color change was indicative of her becoming a whore. (???) In a letter to her the boyfriend made a reference to the “Blacklight club,” a restaurant in the Fenway (the daughter was a student at Harvard) which is supposed to be a place where young women can find work as high class prostitutes. Scott and his compatriot Curtis (Derek Luke) show up at the club and beat up a guy who they think is a pimp, who then leads them to a high class bordello. A young woman there thinks she may have seen the daughter, though she was drugged and taken somewhere else. This leads Scott to a beach house in Essex that acts as holding pen for American women sold into white slavery! After an incredibly complicated plan to follow the trail of white slaves out of the country fails, a secret mission to Dubai is planned to extract the daughter – then canceled because the daughter’s body washes ashore, the victim of a boating accident. (The possibility that the daughter was having a tryst with one of her professors was considered, but apparently forgotten by our super agents.)

Or is she really alive? Curtis comes up with evidence that the daughter is in Dubai after all, and Scott mounts an unofficial rescue mission.


"Maybe my career is in here!"

Without having any real action scenes or particularly interesting characters, Spartan has to rely on revelation of the conspiracy to fake the daughter’s death for entertainment. Unfortunately that conspiracy is way too far fetched and silly. While sexual exploitation of the less fortunate is a real problem in many parts of the world, the idea that a white slavery ring could kidnap young women off the streets of Boston and sell them into slavery in the Middle East is something people might have read in bad pulp novel a hundred years ago. Today it's ridiculous. Even worse is the problem of how the daughter ended up in the hands of the slave traders. There are two possible scenarios, and the movie doesn't really choose between them. In the first, the Harvard-matriculating daughter of the President of the United States decides to become a high class prostitute even though the secret service is watching her 24/7, so she went to the Blacklight club and got lucky that her secret service detail missed her leaving. In the second she was snatched off the street, and by some cosmic coincidence her boyfriend's offhand -- and uninformed -- comment just happened to lead to the right bordello which just happened to be associated with the right slave traders. It's so hard to choose! After that the movie goes out of its way to portray all politicians and political operatives as completely inhuman monsters, because otherwise the rest of the movie won't work. Unless you're willing to buy all these stupid things, don't bother watching Spartan.

Posted: Mon - January 17, 2005 at      

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