“Spenser Confidential” is the movie equivalent of the corpse in “Weekend at Bernie’s”. It is aggressively bad on almost every conceivable front. Do not mistake the facts that the movie appears to be alive thanks to the puppetry of a promo tour with director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg and the largest streaming entity know to man – Netflix – putting it into homes around the world. “Spenser Confidential” is dead on arrival.
We begin with Spenser (Mark Wahlberg), a Boston cop recounting an assault on a superior that led to his incarceration. Suspecting intentional obstruction of justice, Spenser confronts Captain Boylan (Michael Gaston) at his home. During the confrontation, Spenser discovers that Boylan is a domestic abuser and beats the snot out of him. Five years pass, he’s released from prison, and Captain Boylan is murdered. To clear his name and find the truth about the conspiracy that led to his incarceration he teams up with his roommate Hawk (the epic MMA fighter in training played by Winston Duke) to take the crooks down.
Berg and Wahlberg have been building a slate of films featuring the noble pursuits of everyday working-class Americans (all played by Wahlberg). War survival tale – “Lone Survivor” and oil rig disaster fail “Deepwater Horizon” are very good at finding the entertainment in historical events that stick it to those higher-ups that make decisions that affect the workers. “Patriots Day,” another Boston based film, suffered the fate of Aaron Taylor Johnson vehicle “Godzilla” relying on the wholly nonsensical convenience of inserting the hero cop – played by Wahlberg – factually inaccurate situations.
Whatever your thoughts on Berg’s work, there’s usually a vibrancy in the construction of the scene. The dynamic flowing scenes, often handheld and often staged to circle in orbit around huddled conversations – films like “Friday Night Lights” are the formative stylistic text. “Spenser Confidential” on the other hand is a bore. The action is a yawn, even montage worthy bonding in gyms between Spenser and Hawk lack energy. And the needle drops, my goodness. If you messaged your Grandmother who uses Facebook too much to make a Boston playlist, this would be it. One even imagines that Robert Zemeckis would cringe and say “too obvious.”
Wahlberg can be a terrific actor. “Boogie Nights”, “The Departed”, my absolute favourite “The Gambler.” In each of those roles, there’s acute myopia inflected in bravado, ego or self-loathing. Wahlberg is sleepwalking in “Spenser Confidential”. It’s not just a lack of charm, no sense of timing for any of the lumbering and laboured jokes.
The most infuriating thing is the fight scenes. Wahlberg has been Oscar-nominated for portraying a boxer, spends large chunks of the film surrounded by a variety of MMA fighters (Donald Cowboy Cerrone, the most winningest fighter ever in the UFC & Joe Schilling, one of the world’s best kickboxers), and every flailing fight scene in the “Spenser Confidential” give you the same jolt as the James Caan air swing in “The Godfather”.
What’s more, Wahlberg seems to have aged into “old man running” before we knew it. In turn, the most thrillingly edited pieces of the film are ‘borrowing’ from Liam Neeson and the book of “Taken 3”. Winston Duke gets nothing to do except being an ominous gigantic and threatening offsider. Wasting such an emerging talent is probably his saving grace.
The co-writers are Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland, the latter the writer behind “A Knight’s Tale” and “L.A. Confidential” whose work feels sullied by this. I would instead list his credits than attempt to unpack what I assume is him trying (and failing) to wrangle this into coherence. O’Keefe, one assumes, is the latest T.V. show revivalist turned pitch machine, chanting an incantation to resurrect these staples of network television into potential serialised film properties.
This movie is a 1980s T.V. show premise transplanted to 2020 living tissue and being rejected. “Spenser Confidential” is dumb. Like really dumb. Ominous city-wide conspiracies aren’t city-wide nor are they conspiracies. Take for example comedian turned actor Marc Maron who pops up as a reclusive online news reporter hiding out on a boat, unable to publish stories about police corruption because of the risks to his life. He can write stories from anywhere in the world, and LIVES ON A BOAT so he could, oh i don’t know, drive it out of Boston?
Iliza Shlesinger’s Cissy Davis is the life of the movie because her solo comedy bit is like several days in the life one of the sisters from “The Fighter.” Her total wild card of a performance keeps dopey Spenser backing up. The only genuine moment heartbeat from Wahlberg’s performance is a hurried orgasm in a restaurant bathroom while Cissy climaxes screaming a cheer for the Red Sox.
Alan Arkin plays Henry, Spenser’s father figure, one assumes because of the narrative sure as shit wasn’t explicit in explaining even the most minor of details. The beautiful thing about Arkin’s laconic and “I don’t give a f–k” attitude is that somehow the worse the film is, the more he seems like the most self-aware person in it.
I have never had the pleasure of reading the novels by Robert B. Parker or watching the show (it was a little before my time). However, when I reacted to the film, a friend sent me a link to the opening credits of “Spenser for Hire.” Rather than “Spenser for Hire” being reanimated and electrified, “Spenser Confidential” is a mangled mess with Berg and Wahlberg wearing the brand as a skin suit.
