In “Redbelt,” acclaimed playwright/filmmaker David Mamet attempts a thinking-man’s martial arts movie. If that sounds like a contradiction — well, it is.
British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Dirty Pretty Things,” “Children of Men”) is Mike Terry, operator of a Los Angeles jiujitsu academy.
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The form of Brazilian martial arts Mike practices demands the utmost in physical, mental and spiritual purity.
It may be good for Mike’s soul, but not his pocketbook. The academy is circling the financial toilet bowl, creditors are calling and his Brazilian wife, Sondra (Alice Braga), is fed up at having to underwrite the martial arts operation with the meager profits from her fabric importing business.
Their fortunes seem to improve after Mike saves the neck of an over-the-hill action movie star during a bar brawl.
The actor, Chet Frank (a wonderfully dissipated Tim Allen), is so grateful he invites Mike and Sondra to his Beverly Hills mansion. He offers to make Mike a producer and consultant on his new war movie; meanwhile Sondra strikes up a friendship with the movie star’s wife (Rebecca Pidgeon, a.k.a. Mrs. Mamet), who wants her to partner in a new fashion company.
Too late the couple realize they are pawns in an elaborate scheme to get Mike, who regards professional fighting as unsavory and unethical, to participate in a big mixed martial arts competition.
When Frank and his cronies stop answering Mike’s calls, and with Sondra deep in debt to a loan shark, Mike has no choice but to put his ethics aside and join the fray in the hope of winning enough prize money to stay afloat.
“Redbelt” is well acted, particularly by Ejiofor, who makes Mike’s Yoda-like pronouncements seem almost deep, and Mamet veteran Joe Mantegna, who is borderline reptilian as a sleazy movie producer.
The movie paints a devastating portrait of Hollywood perfidy and is clearly less interested in the actual fighting than in the philosophy and lifestyle that supports it. Even so, this is still a martial arts movie and whatever questions of right and wrong it raises will be decided in the last reel by somebody kicking somebody else’s booty.
Martial arts stories (in fact all sports movies) are by their very nature melodramatic, and Mamet has never been good with melodrama. “Redbelt” is filled with peripheral characters and story threads — like a subplot involving a substance-abusing lawyer (Emily Mortimer) — that go unexplored.
The members of Sondra’s family — Brazilian tough guys behind the martial arts competition — are ciphers who could have stepped out of any boxing movie.
Mamet, who has been studying jiujitsu for five years, is obviously fascinated by the subject and the difficulties of living an austere philosophy in this wicked world.
But he may be too close to the material. “Redbelt” is screaming for someone with enough distance from the subject to mold it into satisfying drama.
