Mike Terry (Chewitel Ejiofor, left), and Augusto Silva (John Machado, right), duke it out in Redbelt. (Mongrel Media)

As soon as the new sports drama Redbelt began, I frantically started filling up my notebook with lines of dialogue, each one more portentous than the last:

“[If] you control yourself, you control him.”

“A man distracted is a man defeated.”

“A competition is not a fight.”

“There’s always an escape.”

I put my pen down when I realized that just about every line in the film was going to be portentous, plump with metaphor, supremely arch. Redbelt is a David Mamet film, after all.

The aforementioned lines are spoken by the film’s protagonist, Mike Terry (Children of Men’s Chiwetel Ejiofor). The owner of a Brazilian jiujitsu studio in L.A., Mike is affable, broke, noble and a borderline mystic devoted to the pure expression of his martial art. He idolizes a Japanese master named The Professor, the only man in the world to wear the titular belt. His prized student is a taciturn cop named Joe Ryan (Max Martini), who moonlights as a bouncer at a nightclub owned by Mike’s brother-in-law. Yet Mike himself refuses to compete.

His world is upended when a strung-out attorney (Emily Mortimer) seeking a pharmacy to fill a dodgy prescription accidentally hits his parked car. When she enters Mike’s studio to notify him, something even weirder occurs: she casually picks up and discharges Joe’s firearm, shattering the studio’s plate-glass window. The massive hole – a Mametian metaphor – lets the entire world in.

And what a world it is. Mike’s wife, who keeps the studio’s books and runs her own struggling clothing business, insists he borrow money from her scuzzy brother-in-law to fix the window. But the brother-in-law has his own hands full, trying to drum up business for a major mixed martial arts event. Another promoter (Mamet regular Ricky Jay) insists Mike fight on the undercard. Mike demurs, but before he has a chance to leave the club that day, he ends up fighting after all, unexpectedly coming to the rescue of another unsavoury character, a movie star named Chet Frank (a jowly, oily Tim Allen) who dropped into the club.

Despite having directed 10 feature films, one of Mamet’s longstanding bogeymen (see: State and Main, Wag the Dog, plays like Speed-the-Plow) is Hollywood itself. In Mamet’s worldview, Tinseltown’s reach never seems to exceed its slimy grasp. In Redbelt, duplicitous movie types have infiltrated the apparently untainted world of martial arts, perverting its philosophy and transforming thousand-year-old rituals into sub-WWE spectacle. In Mametville — imagine that theme park: stogies instead of sno-cones, Joe Mantegna as carnival barker — corruption and conspiracy lurk around every corner. Morality is moot.

Mike's wife, Sondra (Alicia Braga), offers moral support in Redbelt. (Mongrel Media)

As an actor, Ejiofor fits well into Mametville. His delivery of the director’s famed patter is more naturalistic than, say, Ricky Jay’s (the man still can’t act). Ejiofor possesses a quiet sincerity that both undercuts and underscores Mike’s desperate attempts at conveying authority. You get the sense that Mike wants to believe everything he’s saying, even as Ejiofor hints at the potential fraudulence of every epigrammatic line.

For all of his apparent wisdom, Mike is powerless to Hollywood’s allure. After Mike saves his life, Chet offers to make the fighter a producer on a war movie he’s shooting. (There are allusions to Mike’s murky military past, as well as a drinking problem.) Mike is dazzled, especially because the filmmakers want to incorporate his unique training techniques. But Mike is a mark. The house of cards quickly collapses, and what we’ve been watching turns out to be an elaborate con designed to bring Mike into the ring.

This is no spoiler – by now, Mamet’s work is predictable enough that his name alone gives the game away. What’s surprising is how absurdly convoluted Redbelt’s set-up is. By the third act, the fatuous coincidences pile up and plot points click into place as loudly and precisely as tumblers in a safe. It’s comical, and not deliberately so. The effect is the same as in so much of Mamet’s work – is the writer and director also pulling a fast one on the audience? Are we supposed to believe that Mamet believes in all this earnest guff about cynical moneymen and a holier-than-thou artist-athlete? I think so, but I get bored thinking about it.

In any case, you won’t believe what you’re seeing, and how far Mamet pushes plausibility. If you can laugh along with it, Redbelt’s inanity is entertaining. Filmed with admirable restraint, Mamet’s battle scenes are more authentic than his dialogue; the fighting looks genuinely painful, even if the reasons behind it feel hollow. By the film’s end, Redbelt’s ultimate point is no more sophisticated than the title of this year’s other mixed martial arts movie: Never Back Down.

Redbelt opens across Canada on May 9.

Jason McBride is a Toronto-based writer.