Redbelt

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale@TheCinemaSource.com

If there’s one thing I can take away from David Mamet’s Redbelt it’s that the most profound heroes are often ones with not much to say. With his latest screenplay, Mamet combines elements from the conventional boxing picture and the samurai warrior story and constructs them in a curious way. The film is as much about putting up a fight as it is about knowing when to hold a punch. Themes of restraint, subtly, and calculation fit nicely with a story about a fighter who stays out of the ring and opts for a different kind of courage.

The hero of the story is Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), owner of a studio that specializes in self-defense Jiu-Jitsu classes. During the training of a police officer one night, an emotionally unstable lawyer (Emily Mortimer) stumbles through Terry’s front door. The officer attempts to restrain the woman, but she nervously resists his grasp and accidentally pulls the trigger of his gun. The bullet shatters the studio’s front window and sends the film’s plot into a chain of events unfathomable.

Within the chain we meet an action movie star named Chet Frank (Tim Allen) and a pair of boxing promoters that eventually prod Terry into stepping into the boxing ring to compete for the first time. I am not sure I can articulate how exactly this all occurs, but in some odd way it all seems to work. The plot certainly has holes, but the story is structured with the kind of intelligence that buries flaws and turns everything that happens on screen into a deep, involving fog.

This inability to see through Redbelt is not just a testament to the work of David Mamet, although his writing and direction are its chief prognosticators. The movie also has a murky visual composition. Cinematographer Robert Elswitt (There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton) is no stranger to film noir tendencies and much of his work on this project is straight from the playbook of old Hollywood thrillers. The cinematography never really stands out, but its effectiveness is in what it conceals. Consider a nice moment towards the end of the film when Terry is exiting a boxing arena. He walks down a dark corridor and appears to be alone. Suddenly, Emily Mortimer’s profile steps into the light from the left part of the frame. We find her in our gaze at the same moment Terry does. If you go back and look at the shot again, it is easy to see the actress standing beside the pillar that partially camouflages her, but on first viewing that is not where Elswit and Mamet are directing the viewer’s eye. Redbelt is full of these minor mysteries.

Structure and composition do much to develop the film’s powerful tone, but stunning performances by everyone in the cast, most notably ...