REDBELT
Directed by David Mamet. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alice Braga, Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer. Opens Fri, May 9
4 stars
To walk into a movie theatre—to walk down the aisle, to take one’s seat, to rest one’s buttocks on the cushions that have cradled thousands of cheeks before yours... this is not an honourable activity. The moviegoer is not a man of honour. He watches others, he watches beautiful people perform a shadowplay, watches them kiss and fire guns and argue and, if the moviegoer is lucky, watches them undress. And then home he goes and sins no more. Hot-fucking-cha-cha-cha.
But if the film is directed by David Mamet, if the film is Redbelt, then the game is different. The game is different how? How is the game fucking different? The game differs, my friend, because the man understands the rules. He understands the rules of men. The man has played cards, the man has rolled the fucking dice, the man has rolled up his sleeves and he has gotten out of his car. He has brass balls. He has walked down the streets and done more than whistle a happy fucking tune.
Here’s a man. The man is named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He’s a fighter. Do you need to know anything more? All right—he’s a teacher. He teaches policemen. He’s a professional. He’s a samurai. A Spartan warrior. He is the proprietor of a jujitsu studio in Los Angeles. City of Angels, but you can’t even trust a fucking angel anymore. The only person you can trust is a samurai like Mike. A man with a code. For what is life, what is manhood, without a code? One might well ask, what is hopscotch without a stone?
Mike passes down the age-old wisdom. “There is no situation you cannot escape from.” “There is always a way out.” A woman comes to him to learn to fight. Mike stands several yards away from her. “Can I strike you?” he asks. “No,” she says. He asks her to come closer. “Can I strike you?” “No.” Closer still—only a couple of feet away. “Can I strike you now?” “Yes.” Whereupon he passes down the wisdom: “Then don’t stand there.”
Is Mamet standing there? As a director, is he now standing where the critic may strike? Where the critic, the man of dishonour, may stand over his film, may straddle it and rain shit upon it? Yes. The critic may, for such is the way of the critic: to watch a fight and see only mindless physical exertion, to look upon Redbelt and see only contrivance and cliché, to look upon Tim Allen and wonder if he accidentally wandered onto David Mamet’s set from the Shaggy Dog sequel shooting next door.
But Redbelt is not playing the critics’ game. Mike refuses to play by the false values of the commercial fighting world, and if it means that he can no longer scrape together the shekels he needs to pay the rent on his dojo, then so fucking be it. So fucking be it. And if David Mamet refuses to play the critics’ game—if he wants to stage a climactic fight scene that even Sylvester Stallone would find a little on the phony side—then so be it. So be it in spades, my friend. Listen: nothing with a quill pen in it ever made a nickel.
Go to Ricky Jay, my friend, who plays a slimy fight promoter; go up to his pockmarked face and tell him you found Redbelt a little on the ludicrous side. Go to Joe Mantegna, who plays a slimy Hollywood producer, and tell him you thought Redbelt offended your feminist sensibilities with the scene where Mike tells a rape victim she should have been able to fight the guy off. Go to William H. Macy and ask him why he wasn’t invited to be in this movie too. Hell, go to Mamet himself and voice your pissant grievances, my friend, and see if you impress him the slightest jot or tittle.
You won’t, my friend. Because Mamet knows what he’s created. He knows Redbelt is as lethal as a perfect jujitsu move. He knows that if it he were Japanese and working with an all-Asian cast, those same critics would declare it a masterpiece. He knows he’s the master of the ring. He knows he has nothing to prove. He’s the professor. He’s the man behind the man behind the wheel. He’s so cool, sheep count him.
What the fuck does any of that mean? You tell me. Who wears the redbelt? David Mamet wears the fucking redbelt, Junior. Now wipe that smirk off your face, you brain-dead liberal, before David Mamet wipes it off for you.
