A connoisseur's thriller from writer-director David Mamet, distilled almost to a state of abstraction. The President's daughter, a wing-spreading college student in Boston, has had the bad fortune to get herself shanghaied as a sex slave, ticketed for the Middle East, on the same day she has had her hair cut short and dyed blond; her abductors apparently do not know who they've got on their hands. There are numerous points -- this being one or two of them -- at which the plotting might seem far-fetched, but there is no point at which we are allowed the leisure to measure precisely how far. Exposition is minimal (familiar appellations such as "First Daughter," "Delta Force," "FBI," "CIA," even "President," are never uttered), and we must strain to pick up our facts and our clues on the fly, from characters too deeply immersed and too pressed for time to be bothered to bring us up to speed. Links in the chain of events are not always securely fastened, and not all questions will be answered, nor all t's crossed and i's dotted. (Eyes crossed, more likely, as in the Picasso-esque self-portrait with which the missing girl signs her missives.) The effect is exhilarating, and frankly a little flattering. Mamet trusts us to catch up and keep up; expects us to suck it up and tough it out. The gappy plotline, needless to say, is not the product of oversight or neglect; it is a conscious and calculated style, and it is all Mamet's own. It finds its root, and its resonance, in such murky realities as the seventeen-minute break in Nixon's White House tapes, or Reagan's under-oath memory lapses on the Iran-Contra affair, or the senior Bush's convenient position "out of the loop" on that same affair. We never get the full story on these things. And we do not get the full story here. Whatever the film lacks, however, in solidity of logic, it more than makes up in steadiness of pace and of rhythm: that unmistakable Mametian rhythm, the rhythm of hard-boiled wit ("If I want camaraderie, I'll join the Masons") and the rhythm of incantatory poetry ("I am here to get the girl back, sir, and there is nothing I will not do to get the girl back"). Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy, Kristen Bell, Tia Texada. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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