Although director/co-scripter Shane Black gets credit for momentum and audacity, this overcooked crime thriller frequently borders on ridiculous: not quite a cartoon, but darn close at times.
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| Ed (Keegan-Michael Key) pulls up a schematic, to explain a key part of the plan, while his comrades — from left, Brenda (Claire Lovering), Zen (Rosa Salazar), Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield) and Parker (Mark Wahlberg) — listen attentively. |
Given that this film’s script is based on the “Parker” book series by Donald E. Westlake, we can blame Black, along with co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, for the often silly results here. They’d have done much better by adapting a specific novel.
A bit of history:
Parker — we never learn his first name — starred in 24 novels by Westlake, writing under the pseudonym Richard Stark: from 1962’s The Hunter to 2008’s Dirty Money. Parker is an amoral and coldly ruthless career criminal: fond of huge scores, and prone to being betrayed by a colleague, thereby setting up a vengeance sub-plot.
He has been a popular character in cinema practically from the beginning: played by Lee Marvin (1967’s weirdly existential Point Blank), Jim Brown (1968’s The Split), Robert Duvall (The Outfit), Peter Coyote (1983’s Slayground), Mel Gibson (1999’s Payback) and Jason Statham (2013’s Parker).
Now Mark Wahlberg has taken the mantle, and — in fairness — he makes a good Parker. Wahlberg displays the appropriate level of grim callousness, and is credibly physical during skirmishes. He also quotes a portion of Parker’s “code” at one point, elaborating that he prefers to avoid killing people: not out of morality, but because murder invites increased attention from the police.
The film opens midway through a heist of the vault at Meadowview Downs Racetrack: a caper that goes south due to an unexpected interruption. The subsequent eye-rolling vehicular chase along the track, amid a race, clearly didn’t involve actual horses, and is an early indication of Black’s tendency toward wretched excess.
The sequence also is rather tasteless.
Having recovered the score, Parker and his team return to their base, in order to split the proceeds ... at which point the sexy Zen (Rosa Salazar) abruptly pulls out a gun. Parker escapes, although badly wounded. After being nursed back to fighting health — apparently in no time at all! — he sets about finding Zen.
That involves enlisting longtime associate Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), currently running a barely-holding-on summer stock theater company. During the course of several confrontations, Parker finally locates Zen ... at which point she piques his curiosity by pleading just cause for her actions, explaining that she needed the entire $400,000 racetrack take, in order to finance a much larger operation: saving her entire country.
Its corrupt President De La Paz (Alejandro Edda) has arranged to have the treasure from a recently uncovered shipwreck displayed at the United Nations ... after which, according to media publicity, the treasure items will be sold to private collectors, in order to help his ailing country.
Ah, but De La Paz actually intends to sell the $1 billion treasure himself, and keep all the money. To that end, he has enlisted the New York City-based crime syndicate, The Outfit, to help steal the treasure. (This organization looms large in the Parker novels.)
Zen plans to steal it first. Unfortunately — aside from the obvious folly of going up against The Outfit — Parker’s life was spared earlier by its current leader, Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), in exchange for never again setting foot in the city.
Got all that?
Parker assembles a team composed of Zen, Grofield, Ed and Brenda Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering) and goofball getaway driver Stan Devers (Chai Hansen). Their challenge: to infiltrate the country’s most heavily guarded building.
(Grofield and the Mackeys are ongoing supporting characters in the Parker novels, where the former does indeed run a struggling theater company.)
Additional sidebar folks here include Kincaid (Nat Wolff), Lozini’s lieutenant and head gopher; Bosco (Andrew Ford), Reggie (Adam Dunn) and Mateo (Gabriel Alvarado), three of Zen’s associates; and Phineas Paul (Chukwudi Iwuji), the billionaire who plans to purchase the most important treasure item, the sunken ship’s massive figurehead of the Lady of Arintero.
If this seems like an increasingly convoluted character dump, it is ... but don’t worry; many of those folks don’t live long enough to matter.
What follows involves countless skirmishes, melees, escapes, vehicular chases, setbacks, double-crosses and other assorted pandemonium, much of it relying on contrivance and absurd coincidence, and climaxing with a runaway train sequence (which also doesn’t look the slightest bit real).
Stanfield’s Grofield is a cool, wise-cracking alternative to Wahlberg’s intense Parker, and Salazar makes a terrific, credibly lethal femme fatale. Key adds mild comic relief as Ed Mackey, but Hansen’s Stan is a sloppy idiot, whose presence wouldn’t have been tolerated for a second by Westlake’s Parker. The usually reliable Shalhoub is badly miscast, and turns Lozini into a whiny fashion plate who doesn’t look the slightest bit dangerous.
The quiet denouement, after all the preceding craziness, is pure Westlake. Alas, it’s too little, too late.
Amazon Studios optioned the entire Parker property, with the goal of launching a series of intertwined films and TV shows. On the basis of this first entry, all concerned need to try a helluva lot harder.
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