Susan Granger’s review of “Parker” (Film District)
When mystery writer Donald E. Westlake was alive, he fiercely guarded his hardboiled, highly principled antihero character known as Parker, featured in 24 of his novels. But Westlake died in 2008 and his estate is obviously not as protective, because muscled Jason Statham has become the master criminal who righteously operates within a specific code of honor: “I don’t steal from anyone who can’t afford it, and I don’t hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”
In the opening sequence, Parker’s cohorts bungle a robbery at the Ohio State Fair, resulting in an unintentional fatality, but they get away with the money. Instead of spitting it five ways, as they’d previously agreed, the gang wants to invest it in their next job, but Parker refuses. So they shoot Parker, leaving him for dead on the side of the road. Not surprisingly, he survives. Ignoring warnings from his barely intelligible mentor, Hurley (Nick Nolte), Parker then vows vengeance. When he tracks down his duplicitous former associates, led by Melander (Michael Chiklis), they’re plotting their next heist in Palm Beach. Wearing a 10-gallon hat and speaking with a Texas twang, Parker gets involved in a partnership with a curvaceous, cash-strapped Florida realtor, Leslie Rodgers (Jennifer Lopez), who lives with her meddling, telenova-loving Latina mother Ascension (scene-stealing Broadway star Patti LuPone). Parker has an ostensible love interest in Claire (Emma Booth), who becomes the target of an assassin from Chicago, but she escapes and that subplot goes nowhere.
Adapting the novel “Flashfire,” which Westlake wrote, using the pseudonym of Richard Stark, screenwriter John J. McLaughlin (“Hitchcock,” “Black Swan”) and director Taylor Hackford (“Ray,” “An Officer and a Gentleman”) have crafted what amounts to an underdeveloped, uneven, low-budget B-movie, a muddled crime-action thriller that’s not worth the price of admission.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Parker” is a paltry 4. While the movie is dedicated to his memory, it’s a blessing that Donald Westlake never lived to see it.
