“Redbelt” is not David Mamet’s best film, but it has the virtue of stirring into one nifty little cocktail the most fascinating themes of his earlier work: sleight of hand and magic, gamesmanship, Hollywood slime, and the warrior’s code of honor. The last is central to this film, which revisits the same question asked in 2004’s “Spartan”: how can a lone warrior retain his honor fighting in an arena corrupted by our culture’s postmodern fiction factories?

The new inquiry is more successful, if for no other reason than Mamet has transfered his laconic hero from the Middle East back to more familiar ground in the States. Mamet’s signature brand of tough guy chicanery sounds more at home on the streets of Los Angeles than it does in the sands of Dubai, and the philosophical code by which its hero lives makes more sense spoken in a jiu-jitsu class than an Army barracks. Urban wise guys can play subtle angles the battlefield’s chaos won’t allow.

In Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry, a philsophically balanced jiu-jitsu instructor, Mamet gives us one of his most likable heroes. Ejiofor is the point of intersection for all of the lines of energy flowing through the movie, but what makes “Redbelt” interesting is that his centrality is a freakish character trait rather than a plot device. His gentle demeanor belies a powerful gravitational pull that draws everything and everyone into his orbit, and when he attracts luck, he attracts the good and bad kind in equal amounts.

Fortune certainly messes with him. The sudden changes that occur in his life after he saves Chet Frank (Tim Allen) from death only keep to this side of ridiculous because of Ejiofor’s gravity. No matter the context—even a bloody hand-to-hand combat with a karate champion—he is the calm center in a whorling vortex. Only a few actors, Clint Eastwood being the supreme example, can carry a movie as magisterially as Ejiofor does here (indeed, there is a great Western out there starring Ejiofor in the Eastwood role, if someone would bother to make it).

After a meandering first hour and a half, “Redbelt” features a final sequence which is one of the better set pieces to have come along in quite awhile. Ejiofor’s compromise, to fight a rigged match to earn himself a much-needed prize purse of fifty grand, is a wonderful payoff to the twists and turns the story took to get there. Not all of those twists are believable, such as the stolen watch or the cop’s suicide, but they can be overlooked. Aside from a few scenes of needed exposition, the entire movie could have been contained in the last night at the arena without missing a whole lot.

With Japanese drums building a martial cadence on the soundtrack, Ejiofor, in a largely dialogue-free stretch, slowly works through his private moral calculus to arrive at a profound decision. Earlier in the film he tells Frank, “Everything has a force. We must redirect it or let it pass by us.” At the end, in one of Mamet’s best scenes—a scene with no dialogue, ironically—he chooses direct combat over redirection. From there it’s ‘man on a mission’ time, and if Mamet’s assault on the phony glitz of Hollywood wasn’t already a lethal one, Ejiofor’s stoic march to the ring, his dignity as a warrior contrasted with the thieving con-artists around him, supplies the coup de grace.

This is a new form of Tinseltown bashing for Mamet. Despite Tim Allen’s obvious potential to bring some comedy to the role of the aging action star Chet Frank, Mamet keeps things downbeat and cynical. Magicians are tricksters who carry a certain honor, con artists delight him, but Hollywood people, Mamet’s peers, are treated with bracing disdain. Power players in the media appall him because their kind of verbal jiu-jitsu, in contrast to the fighter’s spirit, reeks of dishonor.

We are a million miles from the shocking yet charming degree of evil on display in, say, Robert Altman’s “The Player”. Allen and his right hand man, played by Joe Mantegna, are nothing more than witless thieves. They are shabby and venal, not snake oil salesmen, just snakes. Allen hasn’t a funny line in the movie, and when Mantegna is confronted by Terry over the stolen watch at dinner, he ducks out of the room in a manner as cowardly as it is sleazy. Unlike many of his “insider” peers, who lay out a feast of grotesqueries, Mamet tears the lid off his industry to reveal a nest of fat, complacent cockroaches. His films are all the more scabrous toward Hollywood because he pointedly refuses to redeem them by making his industry villains out to be colorful. His revenge is that they are both wicked and uninteresting.

To stand apart, Mamet avoids slickness. His dramatic range is fusty, atonal, and, some clever writing aside, unpolished as a whole. The rough edges make the stories implausible even as the illusions they spin require the appearance of plausibility. He’s a director who likes to put magic tricks in his movies rather than a director who’s actually a magician. Ricky Jay and Rebecca Pidgeon typify the odd disconnection in his films. Both show up as liars or scam artists only half-interested in fooling anyone. They act unconvincingly, as if Mamet felt morally obligated to give the audience a “tell” as they spin their lies.

Jay, always an endearing actor despite his limitations, sounds like he’s pushing through a dress rehearsal when he lamely tells Terry, “I’ll make you money. I’ll make you money”. Repetitions like that worked in “Glengarry Glen Ross” because the top-flight actors sold those lines, but here they dribble off Jay’s lips. Pidgeon, for her part, speaks her lines as if she doesn’t know the cameras are rolling. Two indelible parts of Mamet’s cinematic world, they’re reassurances that Mamet works in Hollywood but isn’t a product of it, as if artistic clumsiness were a guarantee of moral fiber. Ever the lone warrior, Mamet, and we’re better off for it.