Rock ’em, sock ’em!
Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg cut loose in latest collaboration ... and it’s a lot more fun
LOS ANGELES “Man, you get beat up a lot,” an aspiring boxer tells the eponymous punching bag/ pulp-fiction private eye Mark Wahlberg plays in Spenser Confidential. “And I’ve noticed every single time you get your face pushed in, you come back with just a little bit more information.”
That’s a pretty apt description of Spenser’s modus operandi, and one of several self-aware winks that makes this genre-bruising, made-for-netflix action vehicle a lot more fun, if not nearly as respectable, as Wahlberg’s four previous collaborations with director Peter Berg.
In those films — which include a trio of panic-attack true-story thrillers, Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day — Wahlberg and Berg seemed to be reaching for some kind of awards-season legitimacy. Here, on the other hand, they’re just cutting loose.
Conceived by author Robert B. Parker, the Spenser character first appeared on the small screen via the Spenser: For Hire series. Though actor Robert
Urich played him cool at the time, there’s not much connection between the ’80s series and this movie.
The version of Spenser that Wahlberg embodies was stripped of his badge and sentenced to five years in prison for assaulting a crooked BPD captain (Michael Gaston).
Spenser Confidential picks up on the day its title character is meant to be released, and it’s only then that he’s set up by a soft-spoken fellow inmate (rapper Post Malone, unnerving in a small role) and jumped by the biggest goons in his block.
Thus, Spenser re-enters the free world with a shiv to the side and a cut to the face — the first scars in a collection of mementoes of his colourful run-ins with disgruntled ex-colleagues, gang members and one very persistent German shepherd. But before he can get settled, the BPD superior he assaulted all those years earlier turns up dead in a grisly hit.
Spenser would be an obvious suspect, if whoever’s responsible hadn’t pinned the murder on another good cop. Spenser vows to investigate it himself, extracting clues the painful way: one beating at a time.
Berg allows the star’s natural charisma to define the character, adapting Spenser to Wahlberg’s persona rather than the other way around.
The film even pokes fun at itself in the process, fully aware that Spenser Confidential isn’t meant to be taken as seriously as Wahlberg ’s last few movies or his appearances in critical successes like The Departed — and just as well, since irreverence plays well on Netflix.