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The Spanish Prisoner (1997)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
8/12, 3/20
8/12:
Coming fresh off House of Games, I eagerly looked forward to the next thriller:
The Spanish Prisoner.
I've always liked David Mamet's stuff, and they make for great pictures because of his excellent writing. Well, the latter
is a repeat of the former but isn't much better. Perhaps, it's too predictable this time because of the dead giveaways
except for the ending which is more of a surprise.
For a mathematician, Joe Ross is sure dumb which is off-putting. Seeing the countenance
on his face, I expected him to hold a Ph.D. degree, act like a chess grandmaster, be fluent in several world languages, and
play a couple of musical instruments. Yet he does the unthinkable of all time: bring his book of actual formulas to the
meeting!
No self-respecting mathematician will ever do that. He should've made up the stuff because almost nobody understands
advanced mathematics. Why he didn't do it is that David Mamet has no true understanding of how a mathematician's mind works.
Therefore, The Spanish Prisoner is a flawed picture.
When I saw the ferry attendant asking for tickets near the end, I couldn't make out his face to see whether or not it's
Joe Mantegna. Alas no, but what a movie moment if it was him and he got to say, "Oh, you're a bad pony, and I'm not going
to bet on you!" Anyway, it's a great performance by Campbell Scott, but Steve Martin? Not so much because he had done the
same thing in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels which is another dead giveaway just
like how Rebecca Pidgeon is.
All in all, The Spanish Prisoner is a worthy, if predictable, neo-noir with plenty of Hitchcockian twists.
3/20:
The ferry boat attendant should've been played by Joe Mantegna because it would be perfect.
Well, my opinion of The Spanish Prisoner is worse now. The first half runs too long with a lot of pointless talk
although the tide suddenly changes during the second half, making the picture better. Yet it seems catchy on purpose in
the hopes of salvaging the film as a whole. Director David Mamet was so in love with his words that he forgot there's an
audience to please.
As Susan, Rebecca Pidgeon is the biggest dead giveaway because she's too glib to believe; hence, there must have been a
catch the entire time. Ever wonder why Rebecca Pidgeon got the most attention besides Campbell Scott? It's because she's
David Mamet's wife. How funny it is to see the idiot Felicity Huffman playing an FBI agent when she recently pleaded guilty to
federal charges after admitting to paying a proctor $15,000 to change her daughter's SAT answers.
What I don't understand is why Joe didn't make up crap in his book of formulas instead of giving
away the real thing. It's not like everybody can read advanced mathematics; in fact, most don't even understand algebra.
Just fill the pages with logarithmics, derivatives, porn data, and a bunch of hypothesis tests, and call it a day.
All in all, The Spanish Prisoner is convoluted to the nth power.