The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Directed by David Mamet. Starring Campbell Scott, Rebecca Pidgeon, Steve Martin, Ricky Jay, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman, Ed O’Neill. [PG]

Scott’s contracted corporate employee, Joe Ross, has developed a prized Macguffin known as “the Process” and is on an island retreat when he makes the acquaintance of a wealthy, enigmatic stranger (Martin) who asks for a simple favor that snowballs into a complicated series of oblique misunderstandings, aborted rendezvous, and paranoid threats. With a seemingly elaborate, Hitchcockian plot inspired by the titular confidence game, the viewer can recognize mistake after mistake Joe makes, but that’s just part of the twisty fun, and by both flattering and undermining said viewer’s own cleverness, Mamet and company sink the hooks in early enough that it borders on the arresting almost the entire way. The writer/director’s trademark “Mamet-speak” has been tamed like an unruly dogie—not a single profanity to be found coming from these scoundrels’ mouths—but the riddles, allusions, quotations, fragments and echoed lines remain, and the supporting cast (most notably an against-type Martin who never cracks a smile) is skilled at making their unnatural line readings intriguing instead of off-putting. As the potential victim, however, Campbell is like petrified wood, so the delectable ingredient of a sympathetic hero caught in a spider’s web is missing. Music by Carter Burwell.

76/100