Confidentially Crud

Given the incredible liberties that screenwriters Sean O'Keefe and Brian Helgeland take with their source material, the only honest way for a Robert B. Parker fan such as your humble blogger to review the Netflix release Spenser Confidential is in two separate arenas. How does it succeed on its own and then how does it succeed as an adaptation of Parker's best-known character and his world?

As to the first, the answer is a weak meh. Mark Wahlberg plays the title character, an ex-cop just released after a five-year sentence for thoroughly punching a superior officer. He moves in with an old friend, gym owner Henry Cimoli (Alan Arkin), who puts Spenser up with a new fighter he is training, Hawk (Winston Duke). But the police captain is murdered the very day Spenser is released, and when officers question him about it he becomes curious himself. The apparently neat frame of another officer for the crime motivates him to find the truth, and he is able to enlist Hawk and Henry to his cause, as well as his (sort of)ex-girlfriend Cissie (Iliza Shlesinger).

The entire main cast -- all of whom are Friar favorites -- work very hard to make the O'Keefe-Helgeland script better than it has any right to be. They succeed but since the original material started out so far below adequate they can barely manage to elevate it to the aforementioned meh. Banal predictability means not a single development in the story can sustain the slightest suspense. Plot holes wide enough for an 18-wheeler keep the narrative swerving from side to side in often futile attempts to avoid them. Had Robert Parker never written a Spenser book or had these characters been removed from any connection to the books, Spenser Confidential would still be a solid exhibit in the case that Netflix has more money than it knows what to do with.

-----

But Robert B. Parker did write Spenser novels, and the inevitable comparison between his version of the characters and the Spenser Confidential version makes the latter a nearly complete failure. It's not simply that O'Keefe and Helgeland changed the characters' backstory, relationships and in a few places substituted entirely new characters to take familiar roles. Robert Urich brought a lightness of spirit to Spenser that Parker didn't often intend in the 1980s Spenser for Hire, so changes by themselves are not necessarily harmful.

Meaningless changes, though, made for no discernible reason are another matter. Some may be intended to bring a comedic element into the mix and the question of whether or not that's a good idea is made moot by the dismal execution. Again the cast tries as hard as they can but short of giving them the authority to rewrite the script they're fighting a lost cause.

Several gushing reviews on Confidential's Facebook page note that the movie's ending sets up sequel possibilities, and one commenter said they could make several movies since Parker and his successor Ace Atkins have written dozens of Spenser novels. But as seems clear, O'Keefe and Helgeland don't need any published novels as guides for their movies: They are more than capable of sucking all on their own.