Ex cop Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) has spent the last five years in jail because he has physically attacked his commanding officer Captain Boylan (Michael Gaston) because he was a dirty cop - and a wifebeater because subtlety's not this film's thing. On the day Spenser's released from jail, Boylan is killed execution style and for a time, Spenser's under suspicion even, but his former partner Driscoll (Bokeem Woodbine) is convinced of his innocence from square one, plus Spenser has a airtight alibi. Then another cop, Graham (Brandon Scales), is found dead, an apparent suicide - but Spenser has known Graham back when and is convinced he cannot have commited suicide, and when it's revealed that Graham was a dirty cop, Spenser has a gut feeling something's wrong, and he, helped by his roommate Hawk (Winston Duke), their landlord Henry (Alan Arkin), and later even his on-again-off-again girlfriend Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger), starts to investigate. And while he gets beaten up again and again he slowly puts a case together that has something to do with an abandoned dog race track that's to be turned into a casino to whitewash drug money - and it's apparently set up by a gang of dirty cop, led by none other than Spenser's former partner Driscoll. So without having an actual plan, Spenser steals a drug carrying van from the baddies, and before you know it, the baddies kidnap Henry. In the finale, Spenser and Hawk storm the baddies' HQ with a truck, thus putting most baddies out of action, and while Hawk single-handedly takes out the foot soldiers, Spenser dukes it out with Driscoll because ... well, I guess an finale isn't finale without two men engaged in a fist fight playing alpha dog. Of course, everything ends happily ...

Now this is probably entertaining enough if you shut off your brain and just lean back and maybe fast forward through the plot segments to concentrate on the shoot-outs, fistfights and car chases - which are competently put together though without any real panache. Plotwise on the other hand, this film is lacking. First of all, the thing, clocking up at 111 minutes, just tries to hit too many plotpoints, some of which could have just as well been left out, which would have made the film smoother going. The actual "case" Spenser's working on on the other hand is not all that gripping, especially since Spenser's investigation is disappointingly linear. But the main problem with the film is Spenser himself, as he's not allowed even the hint of a character arc: He's a good guy right from the beginning, he was "doing the right thing" when he beat up his captain, he was accepting his jail time for it, and when he's out, he's equipped for everything thrown at him, and he's constantly right in his assumptions with his gut feelings being infallible, too. And that's the next problem with the film, Spenser has no personal stakes in his own investigation, and he even lacks the motive to pick it up in the first place - ok, he has known the dead cop 5 years ago, didn't think he was dirty of suicidal then, but 5 years (and the lure of money) can change everybody. So even if Spenser wanted to "do the right thing", the basis for this is slim, and even more so for his associates, who risk their lives for something they're no part of, that doesn't pay, and they can't even know they're on the right side of the law. So it's really a lack of actual urgency that derails the whole story. As for the whole feel of the movie, it hardly feels like a self-contained story at all, just a pilot for a series, but really a pilot of the old fashioned sort, for a cop show like in the 1980s, where a man was a man while women were pretty (and maybe a little sassy), everything was decided by a fistfight, and the actual plot was always secondary as long as it was good vs evil. Now these shows seem outdated by the 2020s, and for a good reason, and so does this movie, actually ...

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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