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The Spanish Prisoner
Metascore
70 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 21 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 21
  2. Mixed: 7 out of 21
  3. Negative: 0 out of 21
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  1. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Elvis Mitchell
    100
    This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.
  2. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: F. X. Feeney
    90
    Everyone plays their role (and the roles within their roles) to perfection, and writer-director Mamet keeps us guessing what's what and who's who right up until the final minute.
  3. Variety
    Reviewed by: Leonard Klady
    90
    The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.
  4. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    The Spanish Prisoner resembles Alfred Hitchcock in the way that everything takes place in full view, on sunny beaches and in brightly lit rooms, with attractive people smilingly pulling the rug out from under the hero and revealing the abyss.
  5. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    88
    A thriller so tricky that figuring it out is half the fun.
  6. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Jay Carr
    88
    It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.
  7. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    83
    For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.
  8. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Michael O'Sullivan
    80
    Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.
  9. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: G. Allen Johnson
    75
    The weird thing about the films David Mamet has directed is that they have about as much emotion as a cyborg in a science fiction movie, yet by the end of the picture it isn't necessary; by then the audience has supplied their own.
  10. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    The Spanish Prisoner is for anyone who likes to think and feel along with the characters.
  11. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    75
    Mamet's stylized dialogue, elaborate plot puzzles and the angry cleverness of his characterization makes for an invigorating, if not exactly likeable, mix.
  12. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    70
    Mamet has to learn to trust the camera more than he does; he has to stop trying to control everything with language; he has to let loose a little and just give in to the fluency, the ease, the free-flowing pleasure of making a movie.
  13. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    70
    The Spanish Prisoner is the smoothest and most convincing of Mamet's elaborate charades and features intriguing performances by Steve Martin and Campbell Scott.
  14. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    70
    This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.
  15. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    60
    Writer-director David Mamet delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain.
  16. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    60
    The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.
  17. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: Anthony Lane
    60
    This is the fifth movie to be written and directed by David Mamet, and it's his most bizarre one yet; people speak in that dreamy, lockjawed manner we first heard in "House of Games," and their entire lives appear to be lived under the spell of some nameless paranoia.
  18. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    50
    The story of an elaborate con game and the wholesale betrayal of an innocent man, it's also an unusually cold film that ends with a feeling of hollow soullessness.
  19. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    50
    The story works, in that everything fits together, but the film feels hollow and unfinished, like a run-through for a movie rather than the movie itself.
  20. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    50
    The Spanish Prisoner seems an almost purely theoretical exercise, with Mamet as the con man whose sole goal is to make us believe anything he wants.
  21. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Charles Taylor
    50
    The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.
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