Spenser Confidential (2020)

Spenser Confidential (2020)

4/10

Starring

Mark Wahlberg

Winston Duke

Alan Arkin

Iliza Shlesinger

Directed by Peter Berg

Netflix has done better and Spenser Confidential felt (quoting Bilbo Baggins) “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

Netflix are in the market for making movie sequels (examples are 2017’s Bright with Will Smith and 2019’s 6 Underground with Ryan Reynolds) that will keep their subscribers coming back for more. Spenser Confidential is one of such endeavors, it ends with room for a possible sequel, but the film it self was average at best.

The movie producers seem to have an aim in mind to make the movie longer than ninety minutes. This movie is filled with so much unneeded fluff that you can just skip through the time wasters and not miss a thing. This would have best been package as a forty-five minutes series episode, than a whole waste done for this movie.

I have never been on the Mark Wahlberg train, and this movie has not helped in easing me on it.

Wasted characters, too much talk and little to irrelevant action, this sort of buddy cop comedy thriller is based on Spenser: For Hire TV series from the mid 80s. Which were based on a series of books written by Robert B. Parker. This here film though is an adaptation of Wonderland, one of the novel series written by Ace Atkins based on the Robert B. Parker's character Spenser.

Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) just got out of jail after being locked up for five years for beating up his superior officer. He gets to stay with his mentor and that night the said superior officer is murdered. At first Spenser was a suspect, but evidence led all roads to another cop Terrence as the killer. Terrence was later found dead by suicide in his car.

Spenser knew Terrence before he got locked up and he decided to do all he can to prove that he is innocent, but digging into the case led Spenser to discover more than he expected.

I can understand why this was probably made into a movie. Based on the screenplay and the whole plot – if Netflix had done their style and released ten episodes of this, after episode one people will stop watching. This is not the kind of thing you will like to binge, even if each episode had to deal with Spenser trying to correct a different wrong made by the police.

If there is a sequel to this movie released in a later year, there is a high enough possibility that I may see it, hoping for better material, before bowing out completely. Regardless of that, this movie itself is not worth recommending.