Film

After tortuous screeds on Hollywood doublespeak, the present state of self-hating Judaism and his own abdication of “brain-dead” liberalism, Mamet officially exceeds his quota of permissible bullshit for this decade with this preposterous new shell game, in which an L.A. jujitsu instructor (Ejiofor) rescues a movie star (Allen) from a bar brawl and gets roped into a half-pint House of Games as a reward. Did you know that sporting events can be fixed, that movie stars can be venal, that standing on principle is a sucker’s game and that sometimes the most honorable punches are thrown outside the ring?

Connoisseurs of spot-the-Mametism will be in heaven. “Booze, women. What in this life doesn’t get you into trouble?” quips Allen, cast as a megastar because his director’s perversity with actors matches that of his camera placement. Never one to show when he can tell, Mamet—a purple belt in Brazilian jujitsu—smacks his lips over a series of increasingly convenient dei ex machina. Typically, the women morph from loving companions to traitorous harpies off-screen—a failure of foreshadowing masquerading as sleight of hand. Concluding with a shot that surely had the crew cackling on set, Redbelt is an essential bout in its maker’s ongoing self-destruction.