Netflix has done
better, and Spenser Confidential felt (quoting Bilbo Baggins) "thin, sort
of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."
Netflix is in
the market for making movie sequels (examples include 2017’s Bright with Will
Smith and 2019’s 6 Underground with Ryan Reynolds) to keep their subscribers
coming back for more. Spenser Confidential is one of these endeavors. It ends
with room for a possible sequel, but the film itself was average at best.
The movie
producers seem to have had the aim of making the movie longer than ninety
minutes. It’s filled with so much unneeded fluff that you could skip through
the time-wasters and not miss a thing. This would have been better packaged as
a forty-five-minute series episode, rather than a full-length movie.
I’ve never been
on the Mark Wahlberg train, and this movie hasn’t helped me get on board.
Wasted
characters, too much talking, and little to no relevant action—this sort of
buddy-cop comedy thriller is based on the Spenser: For Hire TV series from the
mid-'80s, which was based on a series of books written by Robert B. Parker.
However, this film is an adaptation of Wonderland, one of the novels in a
series written by Ace Atkins, based on Robert B. Parker’s character Spenser.
Spenser (Mark
Wahlberg) just got out of jail after serving five years for beating up his
superior officer. He stays with his mentor, and that night, the superior
officer is murdered. At first, Spenser is a suspect, but evidence points to
another cop, Terrence, as the killer. Terrence is later found dead by suicide
in his car. Spenser, who knew Terrence before he went to jail, decides to do
whatever he can to prove Terrence's innocence. However, digging into the case
leads Spenser to discover more than he expected.
I can understand
why this was made into a movie, but based on the screenplay and the whole
plot—if Netflix had followed their usual style and released ten episodes of
this, people would have stopped watching after the first episode. This is not
the kind of show you’d want to binge, even if each episode dealt with Spenser
trying to correct a different wrong made by the police.
If a sequel to
this movie is released in a later year, there’s a high enough possibility I
might see it, hoping for better material before bowing out completely.
Regardless of that, this movie itself is not worth recommending.
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