Director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s bromantic collaboration and hyper earnest, ongoing masculine dedication to the blue-collared Red State hero doesn’t exactly contain multitudes. Soldier heroes (“Lone Survivor“), working-class heroes (“Deepwater Horizon”), blue-collar cop heroes (“Patriot’s Day“)— what separates these characters, if anything at all, is probably the kind of beer they all want to drink and the sports team they back when they unwind after a long, sweaty day of saving lives and kicking ass. Lately, to switch things up just a tad in the exploration of ordinary joes finding their extraordinariness, the “WahlBerg” collective has turned to genre, arrogant assholes, and more irreverence. Thus, 2018 yielded the espionage CIA thriller full of jerks “Mile 22,” and 2020 delivers “Spenser Confidential,” a banal Netflix action-comedy trying to riff on the buddy 1980s buddy cop movie that has more plot holes than bullet holes and more cruddy “Bahstan” accents than all Boston movies combined. And given Berg’s penchant for the sincere and melodramatic, the film is often pulled in two separate directions: the dumb glib laughs and a self-seriousness he has trouble escaping from.
Things open up to a warm Boston welcome: a flashback to a cop getting his face bashed in. For being a dirty cop and a domestic abuser, Spenser (Wahlberg) is giving his scumbag supervisor the business in his own front yard. Punch by punch, elbow by elbow, exposition voice-over beat by exposition voice-over beat, the cop’s pulsing blood sprays on the snow below. A tongue-in-cheek riff on Russell Crowe’s Bud White in “L.A. Confidential,” the audience immediately understands Spenser’s moral code and what laws he is willing to break in the name of justice. But to find any other parallels between Brian Helgeland’s ‘Confidential’ scripts would take more than a few private detectives.
This ‘Confidential’ is the cinematic equivalent of spending life in prison. Two hours of macho bluster featuring big cantankerous chuckleheads slugging it out, Berg’s biggest mistake is making serious action his priority. Instead of giving audiences a couple of lovable, bickering buddies along the lines of “Lethal Weapon” and “Midnight Run,” he delivers a cliché-ridden flick with bombastic shootouts. Berg forgets the buddy comedies’ best action is the sparring of words. A great explosion stays with you for a few hours, but a great joke marinates in your memory for eternity.
The most memorable moments here take place in prison early on. After five years of jail time for knocking Spenser’s corrupt boss’ teeth out—”the jerkwad deserved it your honor!” or whatever the lousy dialogue actually is— Spenser is finally getting out. Not before the White Supremacists want to give him a parting gift though . In a well-choreographed fistfight, Post Malone and his band of neo-Nazi’s get thrown through some bookshelves. Like all the action sequences, it comes out of nowhere, with no build-up. It’s as if Berg had reasoned: “Wait a minute… we haven’t had any fighting in the past five minutes. Let’s throw this in here!”
And so this becomes one of those action-scene-every-five-minutes films. With a checklist of Boston platitudes in between the brawls, Spenser has a lot of errands to run. First: boxing. Second: see his old pal Henry (Alan Arkin) about a place to live. Third: get mixed up with the Boston mafia. Fourth: get in a fight at an Irish pub. And last but certainly not least: have bathroom sex with his crazy and unhinged girlfriend (Iliza Shlesinger) who screams, “Go, Red Sox!” Amidst all this bemoaning triteness, Spenser finds a buddy in Hawk (Winston Duke).
The two fit together perfectly like dumbells on a weight rack, which unfortunately erases the possibility of any comedic punches between the two. Because they immediately get along, teaming up to stop a corrupt police squad, there isn’t any room for quips. It doesn’t help that the actors look as tired as we do. Wahlberg’s perennial tough-guy persona isn’t convincing here, while Duke seems half asleep. Besides a final shootout, which sees Hawk and Spenser fire shotguns at an army of Boston PD baddies, it’s all pretty laughable.
READ MORE: Mark Wahlberg’s ‘Mile 22’ Is A Violent, Indecipherable, Self-Serious Disaster [Review]
“Spenser Confidential” isn’t playful enough to be a spoof, even though the dialogue is so hamfisted that it’s hard to imagine it being serious. “Fuck you, Spensah,” and “the son of a bitch deserved it” are among the usual suspects. But not even a son of a bitch deserves this Ax Body spray attack of machismo. Spenser’s nutty girlfriend—the one that threw out all his belongings from a 2nd-floor window screaming absurdly, “I love you!” once she found out he was going to jail— confronts him about the film’s previous events at, where else? The gym. “This is a bunch of grown men slapping and tickling each other like gorillas,” she proclaims in her over-exaggerated, high-pitched Boston shrill. You couldn’t have summed up this tedious film better. So chalk this Team WahlBerg’s latest collaboration as a massive swing and miss, which ranks among the city’s worst cinematic disasters. [D-]