David Mamet's unforgiving writing style brings scenes and actors in "Redbelt" to a dead stop. He seems to script with the aid of a calculator, taking relatively normal-sounding dialogue and multiplying by two. Even worse, dialogue that is naturally repeated is repeated again, resulting in this actual quote: "Who's gonna pay these bills? Who's gonna pay these bills? Are you? Are you? Are you? Are you gonna take care of me?" The whole movie is like this.
The embellishments in the dialogue are nearly matched by the excessive plot elements bearing down on main character Mike. Like the various "Karate Kid" installments, "Redbelt" is about a mixed martial artist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) forced to fight for much more than just his honor. This time, he's not fighting high school bullies. He's fighting (off the top of my head) a corrupt actor, the actor's connected handlers, a turncoat wife, circling loan sharks, and thieving fight promoters. All of these despicable elements, and more, are somehow supposed to be thematically embodied by the guy that Mike fights in the final battle. It's hard to remember who he even fights since it's not anyone that makes an impression anywhere in the movie.
This movie could possibly have been saved if it had any lack of pretension and if it had been called "The Karate Man."
Additionally: I don't understand aggregators. I mean, I think I understand how they work and what they do. But they only diminish my use of the Internet. Bloglines takes all the posts from the blogs I read, formats them differently, and removes most of the pictures. All of the blogs I go to are updated regularly. I go to them regularly. Bloglines isn't saving any time.
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