Even Mark Wahlberg can do better than the forgettable Spenser Confidential
Film Reviews Movie Review
Early on in Spenser Confidential, the ex-cop and soon-to-be-ex-con Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) mocks a guard for repeating a joke he first made when our hero arrived in prison. “Why don’t you get some new material?” Bold words for a film that consists of at least 90% recycled matter: stale gags, cardboard characters, and every possible script cliché involving bad cops, mismatched buddy movies, and the city of Boston. Which is to say that while the partnership between Wahlberg and actor-turned-director Peter Berg has produced a few duds since the success of Lone Survivor, none have been as generically mediocre. At the very least, one can appreciate it for being environmentally friendly.
That the film is meant as a departure from the Berg-Wahlberg duo’s usual salutes to teeth-gritting, persistent American heroes (including their earlier trip to Boston in Patriots Day) is not much of a selling point; that it mostly blows is self-evident. Spenser, who spent five years behind bars for beating up his captain, has a personality that basically amounts to that single look of irritated confusion that is the signature mode of coasting through a film for Beantown’s self-appointed favorite son. We know Spenser is a good guy because the opening scene shows us that the captain he beat up was a real scumbag—dirty and a domestic abuser to boot.
We know he’s an even better guy because when said scumbag is found decapitated in a school bus parking lot just days after Spenser’s release, with the killing pinned on an old police academy classmate in an obviously staged murder-suicide, our man gets to work uncovering the Truth, even though he has previously voiced a very strong desire to become a truck driver and move to Arizona. Besides being from Boston and looking annoyed, these are the character’s only defining traits.
Seeing as he isn’t too popular with his old colleagues, Spenser has limited resources at his disposal. He’s moved in with his old friend Henry (Alan Arkin), a gym owner who has turned his row home into an informal halfway house where Spenser is made to share a room with Hawk (Winston Duke), a soft-spoken ex-con and aspiring MMA fighter with a preference for health food. Duke, who stole scenes in Black Panther before playing a very different kind of jocular giant as the dad in Us, brings an understated charm to this underwritten part, which mostly consists of getting on Spenser’s nerves and yelling when a car goes really fast.
Hawk eventually becomes something like Spenser’s sidekick. Later, they find more supposedly unlikely allies in Spenser’s ex-girlfriend (Iliza Shlesinger, trying to breathe some life into a role that largely amounts to nagging in a Boston accent) and a retired crime reporter (Marc Maron, looking as peeved as every other character in the film). That’s the kind of listless predictability that defines Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland’s screenplay, which was loosely adapted from one of the more recent books in the long-running Spenser series created and originally written by the late Robert B. Parker. (In those novels, which were previously adapted into an ’80s TV series starring Robert Urich and a handful of TV movies starring Joe Mantegna, Spenser was a typical post-mid-century tough-guy private eye with a snub-nosed .38 Special.)
As an action-comedy, Spenser Confidential fails on both fronts: It isn’t funny, and its bursts of action are both unimpressive and scarce. Setting aside the feigned immediacy of the handheld camerawork that has become his default, Berg directs in a style that more stolidly recalls The Rundown, his earlier attempt at the genre. But whereas that film was at least buoyed by the burgeoning charisma of Dwayne Johnson, this one aims its attention at a pointless mystery that involves real estate development (don’t they all?) and a conglomeration of criminal elements, including machete-wielding drug traffickers and the kind of track-suited Irish mobsters that the film admits—in a moment of eye-roll-inducing self-awareness—only exist in bad movies. An ending that teases the possibility of sequels, with Wahlberg’s Spenser tackling more cases of police officers and emergency personnel who have been falsely accused of crimes, should elicit nothing but groans.
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Speaking of stock types, Ignatiy, it feels sometimes like your the AV Club’s retired specialist, always brought in for one last job of reviewing awful films.“I told you I’m done with that life.”“I know, IV, but we don’t have anyone else who can handle this. It’s a real nasty one.”“Okay, I need to know what, where, and Wahlberg.”“Buddy comedy, Netflix … and yes.”
Heh.
After reading the line “Okay, I need to know what, where, and Wahlberg,” I should stop internetting for the day. It won’t get better than this.
“Bad news, Ignatiy: Peter Berg was released from prison. He’s already made one movie and we think he’s going to strike again.”
“One more job, AV Clubbers, one more crappy movie to review! Then we can sail off to Taihiti and become mango farmers! This is it! What could possibly go wrong?!”
“Angel Has Fallen, repeat Angel Has Fallen!”“We’re gonna need Iggy for this one, boys.”
Yeah, as if we’re going to believe anyone besides Avery Brooks could play Hawk.
A character who could walk into a room, stand in a corner and do/say nothing and you’d be shitting your pants.
So, basically just Lance Henriksen as the Terminator in some movie executive’s office as part of James Cameron’s pitch to get the movie funded.https://m.eonline.com/au/news/1086638/epic-secrets-about-the-making-of-the-terminator
A character who could walk into a room, stand in a corner, do/say nothing and shit his pants.
The sad thing is that Winston Duke has the talent and presence to be Hawk in a better-written movie.
Reading the review, I kept thinking, “Okay, so the name is a coincidence, they aren’t doing Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, right?” where Spenser is made to share a room with Hawk (Winston Duke)
Oh, fuck me.
Spenser in name only. I had the same slow sad realization that the books I’ve been reading for almost 40 years have been turned into a shitty marky mark movie.
I don’t mind Mark Wahlberg when he’s in the right role but, like I said elsewhere, this is miscasting on the level of Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher or Robert Redford as Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder.
Robert Ulrich had charm to counterbalance his peevishness, so the character wasn’t one-dimensional like this version appears to be.
It brings to mind that Aronofsky “Batman” idea a few years back where Bruce Wayne was going to be homeless and taken in by a auto-repair shop owner named “Big Al”.
Yeah, I told myself this is an alternative universe. Thankfully, Star Trek Discovery already prepared me for dealing with alternative universes. The Spenser novel and TV show universes still safely exist.Let’s hope the attention to this film will encourage a better movie or TV show to be made.
I was in the library last week and took home one of the Spenser novels written by Ace Atkins, the Parker estate’s chosen heir. I read most of Parker’s books over the years and always enjoyed them, even the mediocre ones where he was basically coasting on his reputation and just filling them with the rotating cast of diverse stock sidekicks. Anyway, Atkins wrote a perfectly acceptable entry into the series and I thought while I was reading it that Spenser was perhaps ripe for another movie incarnation. Sounds like this isn’t it, though. Ex-cop? Hawk living in a rooming house? Hawk yelling? Doesn’t sound like anyone involved with this project gets it at all.
Spenser is one of those weird Baby Boomer properties that is such a product of its time that it was never going to work as a reboot. But Wahlberg is running out of beefy, taciturn guys to play so it’s no surprise he made the effort.
I’ve only read the first Spenser and did not care for it, way too much Chandler worship. But yeah, it was very much in a certain (watered-down) hardboiled style, working from a later book sounds like a mistake. Something similar happened with Taylor Hackford’s mostly crappy Parker adaptation, although that took all kinds of liberties with the character (and Helgeland was behind the Parker adaptation Payback, I think he honestly likes this stuff but is translating it poorly).
“I’ve only read the first Spenser and did not care for it, way too much Chandler worship.”Spenser isn’t really Spenser until about the 4th book…. Promised Land and the books are pretty good until somewhere in the 90s where Parker really started to coast.. I have been rereading them over the last few years and have found the 80s ones to be above average detective/adventure stories that at their best deal with cultural and generational shifts…
At the same time I can’t really fault Parker for being a Chandlerite in the first books.. publishers want stuff that kinda rhymes with canon so they can sell it…As for Helgeland, I also think he likes the stuff, and I wonder how much of what he started with is then compromised by co-writers, producers and directors.I do wonder what he would come up with if he was give a free hand with no studio/producer interference…
TBF, even the best written genre fiction has issues beyond 10 or so installments. Eventually you ended up with “Susan” books with little or no action and “Hawk” books with huge body counts where you could tell inspiration was lacking.
I am curious why you think it’s a baby boomer property? having read most of the books up to about 2000 and watched Spenser for Hire it feels very much a Silent Generation property, as the character is solidly a Silent as was Robert B Parker…
the other guys – secretly amazing and underrated.
“secretly amazing and underrated”Neither a secret or underrated.One of the better comedies in recent memory.
so many people i know rag on it as being one of will ferrell’s worst, but laugh whenever i quote it. i think people just like to shit on things with marky mark in them. at least in the greater boston area where he is still remembered as the racist shithead who blinded a Vietnamese guy.
Hey, careful how you talk about the guy who woulda stopped 9/11, had he been there, or so he said.
You’re correct about its quality, but as far as pop culture consciousness it’s HIGHLY underrated.
Aim for the bushes.
Okay, first off: a lion, swimming in the ocean. Lions don’t like water. If you placed it near a river or some sort of fresh water source, that makes sense. But you find yourself in the ocean, 20 foot wave, I’m assuming off the coast of South Africa, coming up against a full grown 800 pound tuna with his 20 or 30 friends? You lose that battle. You lose that battle 9 times out of 10. And guess what, you’ve wandered into our school of tuna and we now have a taste of lion. We’ve talked to ourselves. We’ve communicated and said ‘You know what, lion tastes good, let’s go get some more lion’. We’ve developed a system to establish a beachhead and aggressively hunt you and your family. And we will corner your pride, your children, your offspring. We will construct a series of breathing apparatus with kelp. We will be able to trap certain amounts of oxygen. It’s not gonna be days at a time. An hour? Hour forty-five? No problem. That will give us enough time to figure out where you live, go back to the sea, get some more oxygen, and stalk you. You just lost at your own game. You’re outgunned and outmanned.Did that go the way you thought it was gonna go? Nope.
Aside from Keaton as the inadvertently TLC quoting captain, I did not laugh once in that movie. The timing was dreadful, everything seemed either a beat early or a beat late.
Iliza Shlesinger- Talk about someone who deserves more and better roles in features. (Would probably have made a great Cheetah in WW84)
Why do we say this?
She stole the movie for me, and now I’m loving your casting suggestion so much you’ve ruined ww84 for me.
She’s got personality for sure. I do see she went to the same smile school as Natalie Dormer.
I don’t know how accurate her accent was, but it worked for me. She was probably the best thing about this whole movie once they let her have some lines (for 20 seconds at the end).
Not felt any good vibrations from a Marky film since the Fighter.
Things are getting so bad that people are skipping the “Netflix” in “Netflix & Chill”!
Spenser For Hire was a great show and deserves better. Winston Duke also deserves better. Boston…kind of had it coming.
Any movie that purports to show crime in Boston that doesn’t have Alex Rocco cracking heads is just bound to fail.
I keep telling you, he’s 73 years old and he’s dead!
Granted…
I’ve read and enjoyed some of the Spenser books and was half-considering watching this.Then I watched the trailer and I saw Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg were involved. Thanks, you can keep it.
The Spenser books are perfect airplane reading. Well written, unchallenging, and they move. It’s the kind of thing construction workers used to read on their lunch break.
I read “Mortal Stakes” in the span of a flight from Boston to Montgomery, AL. Much later, Parker was doing a book signing at my alma mater, in Central Massachusetts, and when I asked how he wrote all those books, he said to me (paraphrasing here), “Kid, you write what you know and if you know about hookers, crooked cops and murders, well, there you go”. Very cool guy. Also, I remember the Robert Urich iteration from the 80s (as well as Avery Brooks’ “Hawk” and the way he said “Spenser” w/ such elan) and I think I’ll be avoiding this pale imitation.
I think he was so much better in this than DS:9. Even after he grew back the goatee he was never as intimidating as he was as Hawk.
I’m not crazy about Robert Urich but Avery Brooks was a hell of a Hawk.
Completely agree, and I’m not being at all snide about it. They are fun books that deliver exactly what they promise, and you can put them down and pick them up without needing to refresh your memory. I used to read these when I worked a light board during theatre tech, since those days were long and punctuated by brief bouts of activity. I could read a chapter, do a light cue, and then go read more. You can’t do that with Pynchon!
These characters have nothing to do with Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk at all. Why even bother buying the IP rights?And there is no look LESS appropriate for Spenser than a “look of irritated confusio.”
In terms of shitty casting for book characters, this one is up there with Tom Cruise as hulking mid-life crisis fantasy Jack Reacher and Robert Redford as Donald Westlake’s perpetually rumpled sad-sack loser Dortmunder.
Whalberg MIGHT be able to pull off Spenser, but the character in this thing doesn’t seem to have any relation to the thoughtful and literate but tough PI of the novels (nor does Hawk sound anything like Hawk).
I don’t know, maybe. Wahlberg’s sweet spot tends towards “well meaning doofus”. And, yeah, the header image alone shows that this isn’t Hawk. Hawk is incapable of making that expression.
These idiots (Wahlberg and the director, whoever the fuck they are) never read a Spenser book, and didn’t even bother to watch any episodes of Spenser for Hire. Why did they even bother to make this? Mind you, I grew up in the Bahston area and I loved the books, but I’m watching this piece of shit for Iliza and Winston and nothing else.
Ditto!
Here’s Hawk in one of his few moments of great fear:
I seem to remember an interview somewhere with Avery Brooks talking about DS9 where he started off trying to do something different with the character. Then a couple of seasons in he realized that what they really wanted was “Hawk as a Federation officer” so he just split the difference.
Why bother? Because Americans of all ages still have Spenser fever (not to be confused with other fevers)!
My kids won’t stop talking about the guy. Every day it’s “Dad, turn off Disney+ and put on Cozi TV! We want Spencer!”
Robert Urich will always be the only Spenser. Wahlberg couldn’t carry his fucking lunch.
Just to illustrate the weight Urich brought to the role, when I first saw the trailer for this on YouTube, someone in the comments complained that they cast “too young” for the role of Spenser. They obviously didn’t realize that Wahlberg is nearly a decade older than Urich was when Spenser for Hire premiered in 1985. But what they did see, what even a blind man could see, was that Urich brought a level of maturity that Mahky Mahk couldn’t match on his best day.
Jay Hernandez of the ill-fated new Magnum PI was older then Tom Selleck when the original debuted. Does Magnum REALLY strike you as someone who would pluck his eyebrows?
is it ironic when I look at Wahlberg and Bergberg and their thudding certainty in their flag-waving, inability to handle a metaphor at all, and penchant for disrespectfully altering the life stories of actual people to make them fit their political beliefs, the other person I think of the most is Sean Penn?In Deepwater Horizon they made up an action sequence where a rig-worker climbs a burning ladder to save the day and then dies horrible after falling from the machinery he had climbed to…which never happened. Doing that with an actual named human being is ghoulish and messed up, but doing it with blown up images of the american flag all around the guy is just revolting.I think they should go all the way and just make the movie where Mark Wahlberg stops 9/11 by himself (which, in case you didn’t know, he actually did say)
I remember that, what’s interesting about him is that he thinks his formative years of committing hate crimes when he and 7 of his buddies would jump some poor guy walking by himself makes him a tough guy somehow. He and Berg are proof that even after Clint Eastwood dies there will someone else to continue to churn out movies that appeal to aggrieved white men
This is Spenser in name only right? Like literally just uses character names?
The only Berg joint I’ve seen is The Rundown. And that film is fucking amazing.Probably should have cast Sean William Scott and Christopher Walken in this (although you can apply that to most things).
The Rundown benefited from low expectations, but man. What a fun little matinee that was (especially after some of The Rock’s other early forays into headlining a movie – this was the first one that really had an idea of how to use him).
Who’d have guessed that Stifler would become a national treasure. Role Models and Goon are major Sunday afternoon favorites.
I cannot accept the legitimacy of a Spenser movie that casts anyone other than Samuel L. Jackson as Hawk.Okay… MAYBE Lawrence Fishburne. Or possibly Denzel Washington. But that’s it! Nobody else!I guess Idris Elba would do, too.So, fine, there are a bunch of dudes who I could accept as Hawk, but Winston Duke? Nothing against the guy, but why him? I just don’t see it.
When are people going to get the fact that Wahlberg is just NOT a good actor. There are certain rolls he fits into, and he should not venture far from those.
(In those novels, which were previously adapted into an ’80s TV series starring Robert Urich and a handful of TV movies starring Joe Mantegna, Spenser was a typical post-mid-century tough-guy private eye with a snub-nosed .38 Special.)I plead guilty to not having read any of the Spenser books, but I thought the TV show did a great job showing that Spenser actually wasn’t your typical P.I.
Who exactly is this movie for? The characters of Spenser and Hawk appear to have nothing at all to do with Robert Parker’s books or the 80’s TV show, and will drive away fans of those series. Younger viewers won’t care about Spenser & Hawk, especially when crammed into a movie so generic it could be titled ACTION BUDDY COMEDY. So why? Why make something so lazy and pointless that has no base to appeal to?
I’m going to guess that they controlled the budget and Wahlberg is a big enough name to pull in sufficient box office to make this movie a safe double for Netflix.
I’m imagining studio executives in hazmat suits scraping the toxic contents out the bottom of a big empty barrel and turning what they scraped up into a movie. What’s next, a movie based on the series ‘Mrs. Colombo’?
DON’T GIVE THEM IDEAS
Peter Berg was on WTF promoting this Monday. He knew essentially nothing about the source material. He incorrectly identified the author as Ace Atkins and said he’s written literally 700 books. Berg said he only read the one that the movie is based off of. So we have a movie made by someone who has never read any of the Parker novels and decided somehow Mark Wahlberg is the best fit for the character. What a shitshow…
Atkins authors the character now. This is based off of one of his. Which are trash,btw.
I just read one of them and it wasn’t that bad. Nothing special. Better than some of the later Parker ones where he was kind of phoning it in, not a patch on some of the classics.
I thought it was actually pretty darn entertaining in ways both accidental and intentional.
Peter Berg is to Mark Whalberg as Dennis Dugan is to Adam Sandler
He can’t seem to do better as a human being, but he could do better than this.
This would be an example of a post where, if this were say a movie by Polanski or Allen (or even eventually Louis CK), their horrible past would get referenced. And for whatever reason, for others (like Marky Mark), we just ignore it. Just saying.