Carefully modulated, meticulously clever, and perfectly obvious at every precisely calculated turn, this is the sort of film that drives me mad. I'm not given to trying to "figure out" a movie as it goes along, but The Spanish Prisoner telegraphs every important story point in advance. If you're in step with this film, you're one step ahead of the protagonist, and thus you spend most of the picture waiting for him to figure out what you already know.

Of course, you really don't mind waiting for a really good film to catch up with itself, since just watching the story play out is the pleasure of the thing. Mamet, though, is a taste that I never quite acquired. In the hands of terrific performers like the Glengarry Glen Ross crew, his hard-boiled invective can truly be something to behold. His similarly tricky House of Games knocked me out when I was in high school. But I couldn't sit through Oleanna, for example, and as smart as Wag the Dog was, it left me cold.

When Mamet directs his own script, it only emphasizes the clipped, off-kilter theatricality of the whole affair -- something I find off-putting in a movie theater. I'm convinced that the main reason this film's Steve Martin is so credible as the suave New Yorker is that he trips over the dialogue less than everyone else does. In other words, if you can make these lines sound good, I'll believe that you can do anything. Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's real-life wife) is appealing, but fares much more poorly -- her delivery of every line smacks of self-consciousness, which is a problem in context. Meanwhile, Campbell Scott just mutters his way through the picture. Who cares what happens to this guy? I certainly don't.

Then again, if you like "twist" endings, you may well enjoy this one -- like The Usual Suspects, it's nothing but twist.