Mixing David Mamet's whip smart dialogue and paranoid penchant for double crosses with Tim Allen and the trendy sport of mixed martial arts sounds like a car crash waiting to happen, and while the car here does sputter and veer onto the shoulder a bit, it never actually flips over and catches fire. Everyone walks away in one piece, but slightly dazed; the denouement to the action a bit underwhelming, the bloodthirsty gawkers a bit disappointed.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is in his usual fine form as Mike Terry, a principled but impoverished Jiu Jitsu instructor well-versed in the usual platitudes about the transcendental nature of martial arts. "There is no situation you cannot escape from", he states far too often, "I train people to prevail."
Terry refuses to fight in organized matches for reasons that remain somewhat undefined, although it all has something to do with sport ruining the purity of violent combat by establishing rules, or the matches possibly being fixed. It doesn't really matter why, exactly, all that matters is that his idealism has led him and his vaguely treacherous wife away from a path of material wealth, and into a life where they cannot afford to replace a window after a banal accident.
It's this accident that brings doe-eyed rape victim Laura Black (Emily Mortimer) into his Dojo. It's also this accident, and his strange, controlling insistence that she take off her jacket, that eventually leads Mike Terry into a world of blackmail, bar fights, intellectual property law, rigged white marbles and fabric deals gone sour. In Mamet's mind, one slight turn of chance and you're down the rabbit hole.
There are plot holes so outlandish that they would make the most forgiving of viewers cringe (the marble system and the inciting Dojo incident are especially stupefying.) And there are scenes that seem like they must have come from cough syrup hallucinations (Terry being presented with an ivory-studded Japanese champion's belt on the arena tarmac after rendering thirty security guards unconscious, to name one.)
But even with sub-par Mamet there's usually something of interest on display, and if you're willing to forgive the inconsistencies in the story, conspire with the cloudy reasoning of the characters, accept that there's usually a shadowy hand working against you, and not probe any of it too deeply, then you may find "Redbelt" to be a diverting morality play with good acting and tough dialogue.
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