[In the following review, Kauffmann comments on the role of trickery and deceit in The Spanish Prisoner, and bemoans the film's transformation from business drama to crime thriller.]

Deception is a key theme in David Mamet. House of Games, for instance, moves through a series of seeming truths to revelations that expose those truths as mere tricks. Life, Mamet frequently reminds us, may possibly not be worse than it seems, but certainly is different from what we think it at first.

In the new film that Mamet has written and directed, The Spanish Prisoner deception is enlarged. It is not only the theme of the story, it engrosses the very form of the film. It begins as a tense, high-voltage business drama couched in secrecies. An inventor, Joe Ross, who works for a large New York company, has devised a new process (unspecified) that can bring his bosses many millions. Joe goes to a meeting in the Caribbean for a very private discussion with the company's CEO and some others. Through the first 20 minutes or so, the film whips along, taut and gleaming, with the fine Mamet dialogue that ingeniously seasons common conversation with inversion or odd phrases that lift it from the naturalistic into quasi-abstraction. And under Mamet's directional hand, all the purrs and plosions of Mamet rhythm are teasingly exploited.

As the film proceeds, it changes—not in texture but in intent. The business drama, which promised some tussles about power and money between visible forces, metamorphoses into a crime thriller, a scheme to steal Joe's process, with most of the forces invisible. Joe meets a man on that Caribbean island, meets him seemingly casually, who leads him and the film into another genre.

The title refers to a con game—it's explained somewhat fuzzily—of which this plot is a variation. Joe gets further and further enmeshed in troubles as he struggles to protect his process and as his position becomes more and more dangerous. At last, desperate and alone in his fight, he confides in Susan Ricci, a young woman who works for his company and who has been forthright about her personal interest in him. This confidence leads to more twists that keep exploding like a string of firecrackers, and then comes a final twist.

That last twist alters the whole film. Until then, it has been a set of machinations slickly executed. They are overly dependent on coincidences that could just as easily not have happened, but the whole is a nest of Mametian Chinese boxes. Then the ending changes the film from a progress of cruel enlightenments into arrant melodrama.

What is melodrama, quintessentially? A usable definition: drama in which, un-failingly, justice is ultimately done. The good, who are usually in physical danger, are rewarded; the bad are punished, no matter how things seem right up to the very finish. Seriously viewed, melodrama is an assurance, however dainty, that a supervising eye is always on duty in the cosmos and will ensure that virtue is rewarded. Thus, through centuries, melodrama has been a consolation to those trapped in the travails of life who may feel that their plight is unnoted.

This archetype, not quite the same as the conventional happy ending of romance and comedy, is all very well for James Bond and his many cousins, but for an author of Mamet's distinction it verges on the cheap. The quality of his dialogue and his directing makes the basic sentimentality of the ending all the more discomfiting. Throughout the film Joe is varyingly deceived, but the last change in the very being of the film means that we have been deceived.

Mamet is not greatly helped by two of his leading actors. Campbell Scott, as Joe, is merely capable of being credible, with no greater resonance or depth. Mamet's wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, who plays Susan, is no deeper than Scott and, as a woman supposed to have charm, does not provide it. Steve Martin is well cast as a smoothie.