REVIEWED - SPARTAN: Were you to watch the cobalt blue thriller Spartan with the sound turned down, you might easily take it for a Tony Scott film, writes Donald Clarke.

On the other hand, were you to hear even a minute of the movie's soundtrack with no pictures, there could be little doubt that the hyper-real repetitions in the dialogue were the work of David Mamet. David Mamet? That's right, David Mamet.

To be fair, Tony Scott (or his people) would have worked hard to eradicate the coincidences, logical hiccups and wild improbabilities that abound in Spartan. Mamet, I would guess, believes that if the language is sufficiently pungent and the atmosphere adequately taut, we won't worry too much about the narrative indiscipline. He just about gets away with it.

When the daughter of (we assume) the president - with typical Mametian wilfulness he is never explicitly identified as such - goes missing, the gruffly charismatic Kilmer, an operative of some shadowy US intelligence body, is called in to investigate. It soon transpires that the girl has been grabbed by a gang of (unforgivably racially stereotyped) Arabs to work in a brothel in Dubai. Yes, you heard correctly. Spartan is the first work of fiction since the time of the penny dreadfuls to focus on the white slave trade.

The First Daughter was known for her red hair, but had dyed it that very day - the same day that her bodyguards went mysteriously missing. So the Arabs may, in fact, not know who she is. During the early part of the movie, one suspects that all these coincidences may be explained away by some great unifying twist. But as the minutes pass a nagging suspicion grows that none of this is ever going to make any real sense. And so it proves.

Mamet's world is, however, so dramatically heightened and so weirdly ritualised that it is hard to get too worked up by its dissimilarity to the one outside the multiplex. One may as well complain about the unlikely progress of events in an early Godard film. A great enthusiast for playing-card magic and confidence tricks, Mamet has gradually refined his cinema until it is little more than a (not quite self-conscious) exercise in game-playing.

Like all such games, Spartan is fun while it lasts, but seems less interesting the more you think about it.