I can't quite remember the name of Val Kilmer's government operative in Spartan, and I'm not going to refer to the press notes or click onto the IMDB to find out because it really doesn't matter. In thinking of a possible eponym for his character, something else sparks in my memory; some recognizant association. What it is is a short scene, in which Kilmer stands in an alley; behind him, plastered to the wall, is a poster for the 1998 Kurt Russell bomb called Soldier.

This is certainly not a case of product placement, nor is it a standard trick of David Mamet, who tends to avoid symbolism in favor of cold, hard, frequently elliptical facts. But it is indicative of the way this movie, his latest, works; it is heavy on the clues but light on explaining them, leaving it up to us to remember them, to keep track of them, to keep up with the characters as they themselves decipher them. Mamet is famous for writing stories and dialogue that requires active reciprocation on the part of the audience, and here he takes extreme delight in removing all trappings of context and exposition so that if you don't have your thinking cap on, the plot itself will stealthily elude you. You don't have to be a genius, by far, but fans of Bruckheimer thrillers may get lost without any regular punctuation of explosions. Such audience members may take issue with Warner Brothers for marketing this as a traditional thriller, but I'd like to think that most people will enjoy walking away feeling a little less shell-shocked, a little more refreshed.

Kilmer's character is an agent of uncertain designation but uncommon esteem, to the extent that he's flown from a Ranger training camp where he's breaking in a few trainees to a breaking emergency in Boston, where the President's daughter has disappeared; his presence has obviously been requested by the higher-ups, and the way he drops himself into the situation and takes charge clarifies why. Another agent asks with some concern how long it's been since he slept; Kilmer barely dignifies him with an answer.

Kilmer is a striking lead here. He has a passive intensity to him -- even in action films, he seems relaxed, in control -- and casting him here was a major coup. He takes command of Mamet's dialogue more skillfully than some of Mamet's repertoire players (who are noticeably absent here -- William H. Macy, his most consistent standby, is relegated to a relatively minor role), spitting the words with just the right rhythm, and never forgetting to let us see, in his eyes, that he is constantly thinking. Mamet writes his dialogue to be delivered the way he wrote it. When Kilmer says, "I am prepared to do anything" and then pauses, fixes his jaw, and adds "to bring back the girl" to his affirmation, you can practically guarantee that that pause with all its inherent meaning was in the script, and only a bad actor would subjugate that. At the same time, I think it takes particular skill, or at least a good deal of practice, or perhaps just an entire cast all working on the same level, to make the words sound natural without changing a single one (and you know, the more I think about it now, the more I think the accurate cause would have to be the latter one). In any case, Kilmer's performance is so good it makes me hope there are more pairings between him and Mamet in the pipeline.

There are some initial scenes of interrogation that will make fans feel instantly and happily at home (and, as usual, alienating those who just don't get it): men, in hard cold rooms, speaking in hard, repetitive fragments, hammering each other with words of such expertly simplistic precision that, as usual, if we stop to think, we realize that people do not talk like that; or if they do, we think, they must be smarter than we are; which is part of Mamet's game, particularly since, if you've read his interviews, you know that he does talk like that.

Where was the girl last seen? Why did her boyfriend break up with her? Why did she cut her hair? Why was she not seen leaving her apartment by the Secret Service Agent assigned to watch her? The missing daughter plot almost seems like the result of a rejected Mamet rewrite on the Mandy Moore vehicle Chasing Liberty. It becomes more expansive and surprising than one might suspect, taking on the narrative of a large-scale political thriller but never diminishing the intimacy that is Mamet's forte or the mind games that are , well, even more his forte than the intimacy. There are means to certain ends that would be questionable in any other film; a sequence at a gas station strains credibility, but Mamet stages it in a way where we wonder first if it's a flashback, secondly whether we might have underestimated our hero, thirdly whether -- but by that time, we've put the pieces together and realized that we're right and are so pleased with the trick that we let ourselves get caught up in the plot again without thinking "but why did they do that in the first place?" And anyway, by that time, the plot would have moved on in a new direction, one which leads us to realize that we have underestimated our hero after all.

Mamet is not a director who ignores the camera in favor of his script (indeed, his book On Directing Film eschews dialogue altogether as it explains how to stage a scene), and as much as I would like to just close my eyes and enjoy the dialogue, I would be lost without the visual element that so perfectly compliments what the characters are saying. There are few filmmakers who know how to construct a film so clinical and yet so intrinsically fascinating. He's not irreproachable -- his last film, 'Heist,' was rather uninspired -- but when he's on top of his game, he could make a bag of hammers exciting, or a movie like Spartan, where a character's name is instantly forgotten in the face of who he is, what he's saying and why he's saying it.