Parker (2013) – Review

Where to watch Parker

1 Star

Parker sucks. How did such top talent combine efforts and produce this absurd and un-involving mess. The opening moments have promise, we meet Parker (Jason Statham) dressed in a priest uniform with a gray hair-piece. His cool confidence and assured aggression are right on target with setting an appropriate tone for the material that originated in novel form from scribe Donald Westlake under the name Richard Stark. It would be easy to blame this mess on a bastardized hollywood treatment,but Westlake himself was responsible for the screenplay. A script that feels like it was shredded, blast through a cannon and reassembled at random.

Parker is double crossed by his heist cohorts and left for dead on the side of the Ohio highway. He somehow survives and is nursed back to health only to fly down to Miami and pose as a Texas millionaire looking for real estate. Statham’s accent is so embarrassing, I thought it was going to legitimately be played for laughs. Jennifer Lopez’s character is a recently divorced, real estate agent, who lives with her controlling latin mother. Parker begins to snoop around the Florida area, spying on his enemies and plotting out a revenge scheme that is nothing short of improbable to say the least. Nothing works in this movie, not the casting, not the semi-love story, not the plot developments. It’s a non-starter and unfortunately drags on for nearly two full hours, before finally concluding in a ridiculous and confusing manner, that keeps inline with the preceding events.

Going into Parker, I was reminded of the stylized, professional storytelling that accompanied films like Out of Sight, The Bank Job and even The Getaway. Those loft expectations were quickly dashed within minutes, this movie is DOA. All three above the line players, Hackford, Statham and Lopez need a career overhaul at this point. Parker is the kind of awful film that all but crippled the career of Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson in the mid 1980’s, audiences in 2013 are savvy enough to spot a bomb on sight.

Director: Taylor Hackford
Stars: Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte