Parker (2013)
Directed by: Taylor Hackford
Written by: John J. McLoughlin
Starring: Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce
IN CINEMAS NOW
RUNNING TIME: 118 mins
REVIEWED BY: Dr Lenera, Official HCF Critic
Parker is a professional thief, who doesn’t steal from the poor or hurt innocent people. His mentor Hurley asks him to do a five-man job with a crew he doesn’t know. The job is successful, but Parker refuses to go further with another plan that will earn them millions. The others shoot him and leave him to die in a lake, where he is found half-dead by a family who take him to the hospital, where he chokes out a male nurse, steals his uniform, and escapes. He robs a check cashing store to get funds, steals a car parked outside, and heads for Palm Beach, Florida to get the people who double-crossed him…..
You may not have read any of the twenty-four novels by Donald Westlake, writing under the name Richard Stark, featuring his cold, methodical career criminal, but you’ve probably seen a film about Parker, even if you didn’t know it. Until this latest effort, there have been seven adaptations of Westlake’s Parker books, but the character was usually called something else. The two best-known films are Point Blank from 1967 starring Lee Marvin and its 1999 remake Payback with Mel Gibson, both of which were based on the novel The Hunter. Parker is based on Flashfire and seems like an attempt at a new franchise for Jason Statham, a franchise that could go on for ages considering the number of books, but, like the attempt to put Lee Child’s Jack Reacher on screen not long ago, it hasn’t done too well at the box office and the potential series probably won’t happen.
I’ve never really understood why some Statham films are hits, some do okay and others flop badly. Yes, his movies vary a bit in quality but at the end of the day you have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get, especially from the man himself, who seems to play basically the same role over and over again. How many times has he been the criminal with a moral code who is quick with his fists? Yet he’s good at it, and don’t forget stars as big as Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger used to do variations on the same thing, though there are signs that audiences are tiring of this a bit. Watching this new film, you could be mistaken for thinking the role of Parker was written especially for Statham, as once again he’s pretty much the same person again. He’s even got a girlfriend waiting for him at home and we have flashbacks to earlier happy times, much like in the recent Killer Elite.
Now Killer Elite was a pleasant surprise and Statham’s best movie in quite a while, but Parker is nowhere near on the same level. It’s an enjoyable time-waster that, much like Oz The Great And Powerful, you probably won’t regret going to see but you won’t be in a hurry to see again. I haven’t read any of the Parker books, but this particular story comes across as a fairly mundane revenge tale which has been rather stretched out to two hours, though I wonder if more of the blame can be laid at the feet of scriptwriter John J. McLoughlin, whose previous effort was his travesty of a screenplay for Hitchcock, while even his work on Black Swan was easily the weakest aspect of that film. At least Parker is solidly directed by Taylor Hackford, who may never again reach the quality of The Devil’s Advocate and Dolores Claiborne but can always be relied on to turn out a very technically proficient piece even if he doesn’t seem to have a particular style or personal imprint on his work.
The first third of Parker is decent stuff, opening with a very well-edited and suspenseful robbery sequence, though the screenplay feels it has to tell us that Parker is not all that ‘bad’ right from the offset by showing him win some cuddly toys for a kid in a fairground shooting game. Rather clumsy writing here[ as in elsewhere], and apparently different from the nastier character of the books. We then seem to go into Point Blank/Payback territory as Parker is double-crossed and left for dead. He sets about planning his revenge, and the film really does feel it’s going to get very good here, but once we reach Palm Beach things seem to grind to a halt as soon as Jennifer Lopez in introduced. She seems to be acting in one of her rom-coms, her scatty character quickly tiring, but she has a couple of nice acting moments later on in the film and I’ve always found her a little underrated as an actress [with Enough, not Out Of Sight, being her best performance in my opinion]. In any case Hackford and his cinematographer prefer to focus on her butt, which remains a very nice butt, and it’s good to see a couple in a film of a similar age for a change, though they don’t have much chemistry to be honest.
After a while you may be wondering why Parker is taking so long to unleash his vengeance and just wish him to get on with it, though the film just about keeps the attention, and when it comes, the action is very brutal and bloody, with the red stuff flowing in abundance as bullets smash into various parts of the body. There’s a really good fight about two-thirds of the way through which is convincingly brutal, even if Hackford feels it necessary to dabble a little in that shakycam/fast-editing crap that most of the young directors feel is the way to do action. Overall there isn’t much action in Parker, but it’s only moderately suspenseful as well. It breezes along in a not unpleasant way, with solid performances from most, a few minor laughs and just enough going on so it won’t bore, but in the 70’s this film would have probably been done far better, with better dialogue and characterisation of the minor characters for a start, and humour that felt an organic part of the preceedings rather than seeming tacked on. Parker feels like some of the time like it would really benefit from being cut down to about an hour and a half.
As for Statham, as I said earlier he’s the same as usual and how many times have we seen him escape from a hospital, or suffer horrendous wounds only to walk around fine a few days later? Does he know what a razor is? He partly attempts a ‘general’ American accent for the first half of the film, with his cockney floating in and out of it, then does quite well with a more specific Texan accent afterwards as he pretends to be someone else. He’s still comes across as being very tough, which is the main thing I suppose. Despite being nothing special whatsoever, I quite enjoyed Parker, but I doubt I’ll remember much about it in a few days time.
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