A tour de force by David Mamet at the peak of his power. If you want to feel paranoid and distrust everyone, this is the movie for you. The levels of deception build a highrise that reaches the sky. Even the title is supposedly explained halfway by the good guys, only the plot of the conspiracy is much more elaborate and the “good guys “ need a lot of polishing. Totally entertaining.

Keeps you twisting and turning to the very end.

I want to like this thriller, but I couldn't get into it maybe because the characters are being bland and speak emotionless. Given that smart and theatrical dialogs, I would like to have more intensity.

This one remains an all time favorite of mine. One of the best that David Mamet ever put forth with a great performance by Campbell Scott and a memorable dramatic turn for Steve Martin. Check this out!

Why does no one is this film have any emotions? Why is it that David Mamet told everyone to be as stoic as humanly possible? I just watched this movie for the second time not realizing I had seen it 20 years ago. Films usually aren't forgettable but I remember feeling this way the first time. It's uneventful and we have no reason to care for the main characters survival. I can see how this movie could be on stage, maybe it would have been better suited there.

What I remember most about The Spanish Prisoner is the music. The score is marked by strange and beautiful melodies whose notes are hard to anticipate; downbeats are occasionally accented with the ringing of a bell. The movie goes along like this too. The main character is unwittingly wrangled into a sinister and inscrutable plot. His most precious possession, an extremely lucrative innovation referred to as "the Process," has been compromised. He strains to piece together what's happening to him and who's behind it all. From time to time, he realizes some small truth -- a bell is rung -- but then the melody moves on and he's too late. It's already "in the movie," as the Merry Pranksters might say. What I don't remember about the movie is the emotion. There's a man who by the end of the film appears to have been fooled by everyone. He's even been framed for murder. He's lost the thing that is most important to him. And yet we never see him overly emotive, let alone hysterical. We don't see any other characters like that either. This isn't a bad thing. There's a logic to the movie, even if we don't understand it, and for those wheels to turn smoothly they can't be gummed up by any sort of "why me?" kind of sentiment. It's also helps to let the aesthetic in. It's a cold one but that's what makes it unique.

I loved this film. It is clever and knows it, but it still is fun to watch!

I wanted to like it, but it just came across as a cheap indy film with an overly ambitious screenwriter.

9 times out of 10, when a film doesn't quite work, it has everything to do with the integrity of the story in play. Oddly enough, David Mamet's "The Spanish Prisoner" is in that 10% of movies that suffer tremendously at the hands of epidermal issues, despite featuring a solidly structured narrative. Generally known for his terse, vulgar, and realistic depictions of human conversation, Mamet adopts a surprisingly "PG-rated" approach to telling this story, using overly proper language and formalities to get his characters' points across. This hamstrings things, as the audience has a hard time believing that characters actually talk like this. The occasionally stilted acting layered onto these words doesn't help either, ultimately steering the audience into a "chicken/egg" type of debate with themselves on who's to blame for the artificiality of it all. Is that kind of dialogue simply impossible for any actor to speak believably? Or is the acting not skilled enough to deliver the perfectly reasonable lines? It's hard to say without reading the script, but I'm sure both are of relatively equal blame. Other than these shockingly cosmetic issues, though, it's a really fun ride. The plot is just a few narrative flourishes ahead of you, allowing you to feel as though you're in capable hands, but whilst throwing you the proverbial bone every now and then to make you feel intelligent. I'm sure this was calculated. Overall, it's a solid, yet audibly imperfect watch.

By the by, whatever happened to paragraphs?

Wow. This film was so not worth watching. How is it possibly rated at 88%? I guess there's a reason I'd never heard of it.

For a moment there I didn't trust even myself. Beside that, as a neo-noir: better than many, worse than some. As a crime-heist: better than many, worse then some. My mistake was to expect more, and I should stop to do so.

On aurait tort de dire que The Spanish Prisoner est un film loupé. En effet, ce thriller très calme mais au script extrêmement malin et passionnant pourrait être une franche réussite, même, si la réalisation de David Mamet ne manquait cruellement pas autant de rythme (ce qui est tout de même primordial pour le suspense). Elle plombe totalement un film pourtant bien interprété, avec un Steve Martin machiavélique en contre-emploi qui marche parfaitement bien, Rebecca Pidgeon en femme fatale et Campbell Scott, aussi fade que le rôle le demande. Peut-être aurait-il fallu que David Mamet liasse son script à un autre réalisateur, mais en l'état, il est autant coupable qu'à remercier.

A brilliant movie about one of the oldest cons ever pulled, The Spanish Prisoner. Hustling until the end, this neo-noir movie is high on suspens and deception. Not a must see, but very good entertainment.

Great fun to watch, but becomes a tad silly or over done at the end.

The most accurate representation of a 'movie for grownups' ever. I've tried this movie several times and I can never get past the first 15 minutes without it putting me to sleep. It's like an Andy Sidaris movie with no tits and no action. P.S. I love David Mamet, this one just sucks though.

I like a good mind-bending crime drama that is full of twists and turns. That's what the Spanish Prisoner attempts to be. There are a lot of intriguing moments in the movie, and I'd be tempted to see what could have been done with the script if another writer had been allowed to clean it up. Unfortunately, since it was left entirely in David Mamet's hands this movie suffers from quite a few problems. The biggest one is that people don't talk like these characters do in the movie. It takes some truly awful directing to get Steve Martin to sound this wooden. It is so obvious that Mamet won't let the actors massage their lines to sound more natural, and instead forces them to stick word-for-word with the script. This results in painful dialogue like "Worry is like interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due." What person in their right mind rattles off a fortune-cookie phrase like that in every day conversation? I can't even make an accurate judgement on whether the actors in this film are good or bad because it feels like they aren't allowed to act. Then there's the structure of this entire con game. It is executed very well, and has a lot of interesting moving parts that you never expect. The problem is, unlike a really well-constructed con film, the entire plot starts to fall apart when you look at it in any detail. So many little coincidences had to go a certain way in order to get everything to line up just right, no one could have planned this entire thing. Not to mention how the ending doesn't really make any sense, I'm still not sure who's behind the whole thing and why they did it. Also when they setup things in this film they really hit you over the head to expect something is coming. Through repetition we are constantly bombarded that a certain thing is important, and therefore you naturally assume it's probably not what it seems. It's the strangest combination of over-writing (because details are over-explained and dialogue is way too wordy) and under-writing (because the plot makes no sense, and the conclusion is just glossed over in about 2 lines.) I did get some enjoyment out of the story in The Spanish Prisoner, but the writing is just so bad that I can't possibly watch it again.

Painfully slow, obvious set up, boring as hell.

Inspired by Hitchcock's movies, this film turns out to be good. Not bad.

Despite Mamet's pedestrian direction, his writing talent allows for a constantly shifting playing field. A tale of continuous deception and falsehoods creates loads of suspense and unease as we, along with the lead, question who to trust.