Crime thriller is heavy on crime, light on thrills
Charismatic star Jason Statham and acclaimed director Taylor Hackford can’t save the pedestrian Parker from a ludicrous script and weird performances
Taylor Hackford has one of the more impressive résumés in Hollywood. More than 30 years ago, he directed the hit An Officer and a Gentleman; he followed that up with, among a slew of other acclaimed flicks, the Ray Charles biopic Ray and the Oscar-winning boxing documentary When We Were Kings (which he co-produced). Plus, he is married to the prodigiously talented British actress Helen Mirren, which must count for something on the taste front.
So how does Hackford fall so far off the rails with the pedestrian crime thriller Parker, based on the 19th book in the Parker series by the late Donald E. Westlake (no slouch himself, with scripting credits on The Grifters and The Stepfather)? For starters, Westlake didn’t write this script, and the John J. McLaughlin screenplay is a mess, both highly ludicrous and predictable. McLaughlin — yeah, the same dude who wrote Black Swan and Hitchcock — really treads in the shallow end of the gene pool here.
Can’t fault English hottie lead Jason Statham (The Transporter; The Expendables). He plays the hood with an alleged heart, and he does display a certain magnetism, in spite of his character’s vindictive, excessively violent manner. But it’s a bit … no, a lot of a stretch for the filmmakers to try to convince viewers that he is something of a modern-day Robin Hood. He is given to dressing up like a priest when he does a heist and advises those innocents whom he is holding at gunpoint that he never steals from people who can’t afford it and never hurts anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Sadly, that doesn’t let many folks off the hook in this flick.
We can, however, fault just about every other actor in Parker, even if they are at the mercy of such a harebrained script. Jennifer Lopez does not sparkle as a duplicitous real estate agent who is so down in the dumps that she must move back in with her overbearing mom (played by an ungood Patti LuPone). Nick Nolte looks and sounds like he just came off a monthlong bender as Parker’s crime boss. Not pretty. Talk about sleepwalking through a role. And Michael Chiklis, who dazzled on the tube in The Shield, blunders his way through this dreck as the sadistic, rotund robber who tries to turn the tables on Parker. He looks like he wants to kill his agent.
At the best of times, it’s not an easy sell to establish a bad guy as a hero when he has a penchant for plasma that rivals a Red Cross blood bank. And these are not the best of times.
When the action begins, Parker (Statham) joins up with four felons he’s never worked with before. They rip off a county fair in Ohio to the tune of $1 million. But Melander (Chiklis), the leader of the pack of four, decides he wants to cut Parker out of the deal and leaves him for dead on the side of a road.
Parker recovers from all manner of life-threatening bullet wounds in mere minutes. He is angry. And we see firsthand that it’s not wise to make Parker angry. He seeks revenge, and then some. He learns that Melander and his boys now have their sights set on some billion-dollar bling haul in tony Palm Beach, Fla.
Enter Leslie (Lopez), who is having a heck of a time pushing properties in Palm Beach. She manages to endear herself to Parker and helps him track down the really bad guys. For reasons that continue to baffle, the filmmakers decide not to have Parker and Leslie engage in boudoir gymnastics. Instead, they have him with another, Claire (Emma Booth), the daughter of notsuch-a-mastermind Hurley (Nolte). No, Parker and Leslie’s arrangement is purely business, and already viewers know they’re in for more trouble.
Much gunplay and bloodletting ensues. The body count is high. Intrigue is low. But there is some mirth amid the mayhem: one dim thug, pleading for his life, tells his would-be killer that he’s like Sweden: neutral. D’oh! The right answer is, of course, Switzerland, and the fellow pays for his stupidity.
One line actually works. Leslie asks Parker how he can sleep at night, given his demonic ways. His response: “I don’t drink coffee past 7.”
Others around the set were drinking something a lot stronger than coffee. Either that, or someone spiked their drinking water with mind-altering meds.