I'm not going to explain the plot, because that would ruin the movie. Basically, Scott is Joe Ross, an innocent pawn in an intricate corporate con game where no one is what they seem (a point that's hammered home repeatedly and artlessly). (At first it all seems like an elaborate way for one of the characters to get a date with Campbell Scott, which I can certainly relate to, but then it turns out to be -- yawn -- industrial espionage.)
The movie starts out like typical Mamet, stagy and irritatingly elliptical, with the stilted Mametian language in which contractions do not exist and superfluous phrases abound (viz. "The fact of the matter which we are discussing is the compensation to which you are entitled due to your efforts" -- Joe Mantegna and Alec Baldwin are the only actors I can think of who can pull off the necessary rhythm without sounding like they're reading from cue cards). But the action picks up, the language loosens, and the story grips you as Joe's world becomes frighteningly, Hitchcockianly bewildering.
A few gripes: Biggest of all, Joe makes one colossal, glaringly stupid mistake midway through the film (on which the second half of the movie rests), which is so out of character that it bothered me for the rest of the movie. Also, Mamet is not the most creative or subtle director -- I'm sure he was going on the Chekovian principle that if you show a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third, but Mamet's lingering close-ups of certain items are the directorial equivalent of waving the "gun" in our faces while screaming, "Look, it's a gun! Remember, this is a gun! I'll keep the camera on it for another minute so you'll remember you saw a gun!" There are some subtleties, however, which turn out to be very satisfying in a Usual Suspects kind of way. And Mamet is surprisingly effective at building tension almost from the word go -- the most innocuous situations seem somehow charged with menace.
And why did they hire Steve Martin and not let him be Steve Martin? He gets off a few dry witticisms that show you he can be funny without putting an arrow through his head, but aside from those, he's pretty bland. Either give him more clever things to say, or get someone else.
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