Review of The Spanish Prisoner (1997) by Simon D — 28 Oct 2014

I like a good mind-bending crime drama that is full of twists and turns. That's what the Spanish Prisoner attempts to be. There are a lot of intriguing moments in the movie, and I'd be tempted to see what could have been done with the script if another writer had been allowed to clean it up. Unfortunately, since it was left entirely in David Mamet's hands this movie suffers from quite a few problems. The biggest one is that people don't talk like these characters do in the movie. It takes some truly awful directing to get Steve Martin to sound this wooden. It is so obvious that Mamet won't let the actors massage their lines to sound more natural, and instead forces them to stick word-for-word with the script. This results in painful dialogue like "Worry is like interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due." What person in their right mind rattles off a fortune-cookie phrase like that in every day conversation? I can't even make an accurate judgement on whether the actors in this film are good or bad because it feels like they aren't allowed to act.

Then there's the structure of this entire con game. It is executed very well, and has a lot of interesting moving parts that you never expect. The problem is, unlike a really well-constructed con film, the entire plot starts to fall apart when you look at it in any detail. So many little coincidences had to go a certain way in order to get everything to line up just right, no one could have planned this entire thing. Not to mention how the ending doesn't really make any sense, I'm still not sure who's behind the whole thing and why they did it. Also when they setup things in this film they really hit you over the head to expect something is coming. Through repetition we are constantly bombarded that a certain thing is important, and therefore you naturally assume it's probably not what it seems. It's the strangest combination of over-writing (because details are over-explained and dialogue is way too wordy) and under-writing (because the plot makes no sense, and the conclusion is just glossed over in about 2 lines.) I did get some enjoyment out of the story in The Spanish Prisoner, but the writing is just so bad that I can't possibly watch it again.