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"I ain't a planner, I ain't a thinker, I never wanted to be."

NOTE: This is another one of those times when you're better off going into the film knowing as little as possible. You've been warned.

There has long been an inimitable feel to David Mamet's screenplays, and his direction only reinforces it. Tough, merciless, unforgiving of audience inattention, the films don't provide tidy expository speeches, don't settle your stomach with boilerplate sentimentality, don't spoonfeed you the plot in easily digestible blocks of information. They create a world that is distinctive and unreal but at the same time one that seems to live, exist outside the camera's purview and the timeframe of the script. You just happened to have stumbled in at an inopportune moment.

Spartan, Mamet's latest and best in years, is even more spare and brutal than usual. Its characters perpetually speak in hushed tones and we lean forward to make sure we register what they're saying, knowing that crucial information will be thrown around like so many rag dolls. There isn't a single scene -- nary a moment, in fact -- that doesn't advance the plot in one way or another. But though revelations and twists come fast and furious, Spartan still somehow tracks a course from disorienting to lucid, from entropy to order. This is magnificent thriller screenwriting, a genre masterpiece.

An ultra-elite, "lone wolf" government secret agent named Scott (or is it Bob?) and played by Val Kilmer is called in when the Secret Service loses one of its most important marks -- the President's daughter appears to be missing. Her last contact was a professor known for being rather familiar with his female students, or perhaps her boyfriend, with whom she was seen arguing. Her last known whereabouts are a Boston bar where rich older men come to pick up younger women. The SS agent in charge of her seems to have left his post, though he shoots himself before he can be properly interrogated.

What happened to the girl? The agents in charge (Clark Gregg and Ed O'Neill), as well as one of the President's advisors (William H. Macy), would like to know. Scott and a new recruit named Curtis (Derek Luke) follow the clues to a local brothel, where witnesses suggest that something more sinister may have occured -- was the First Daughter sold into sex slavery? And do her captors even know who it is they have? The government seems to track the girl to a sort of sex slave halfway house in Yemen, but then a shocking piece of news changes the whole nature of the investigation.

All this seems simple, but it takes quite a bit of figuring -- Mamet simply throws us into the proceedings without any evident concern for whether we understand what is happening. Characters speak as if unaware that an audience is watching, which is of course what a good screenwriter should strive for. As a result, we feel like we might actually be bearing witness to a government investigation -- a very Mametian government investigation, but that's probably even better. And then there's the satisfaction of an expertly crafted cinematic jigsaw puzzle that leaves it up to the viewer to put together the pieces.

Mamet is definitely up to his old tricks for much of Spartan, but this time they take on an air of a severe frown rather than the usual sly wink. The characters still communicate with each other in cryptic, roundabout, repetitive conversations, but they no longer seem to be joking. The story contains several elaborate ruses, but they aren't quirky scams engineered to trick the unsuspecting out of some money -- it is now life and death. Kilmer's Scott, in particular, is like Joe Mantegna in House of Games reborn as a government agent, improvising confidence games on the fly, breaking bones as ruthlessly as Mike took cash.

The ending is more grim, cynical and brutal than anything Mamet has ever done, though that's probably true of Spartan as a whole. More intense and rewarding than "fun," this is a thriller that respects your intelligence, demands and commands your attention, makes you work, wears you out. It's just about perfect.