Spartan is a 2004 American political thriller film written and directed by David Mamet and starring Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, Tia Texada, Ed O'Neill, William H. Macy, and Kristen Bell.

While observing an exercise designed to evaluate Delta candidates, Scott meets a recruit, Curtis, as well as Sergeant Jacqueline Black, a knife fighting instructor.

As the team prepares an assault in Dubai, a news broadcast reports that Laura and her college professor were discovered drowned while sailing off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.

He tries to contact Laura's mother, who is touring a rehab facility, but he is intercepted by a female Secret Service agent assigned to guard the First Family.

Avi agrees to get him into Dubai and smuggle Laura out concealed in a cargo container at the airport, obtaining weapons for him and support from a local man known as Jones.

Correctly guessing that he is really acting on his own, Laura says that King Leonidas of Sparta would respond to requests for help from neighboring kingdoms by sending one man, and decides to trust him.

Later, on a London city street, a stubbled Scott is shown watching an evening news broadcast regarding Laura's return on a television in a shop window.

The government spins the story of Laura's kidnapping as an opportunity for the President to take action to end the trafficking of American girls as sex slaves.

Eric L. Haney, a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major who operated in Delta Force, was the technical advisor, and briefly appears.

[citation needed] The review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 65% based on reviews from 134 critics, and a weighted average of 6.5 out of 10.

The website's critical consensus states, "A good cast and Mamet's mastery over the written language elevate an otherwise conventional thriller.

"[11][12] Ross Douthat wrote "Here's my rule of thumb: Anytime a critic praises a director for pushing any movie—let alone a low-budget thriller—'into the abstract,' you know you've entered the realm of the lousy-but-pretentious, which is not a particularly fun place to spend a Saturday night.

The only thing that raises it to the level of 'interesting pop culture artifact' is the sheer strangeness of its central conceit, which is almost bizarre enough to merit the price of the Blockbuster rental.