Spenser Confidential (2020)

“Spenser Confidential” (2020) was the most Mark Wahlberg movie I’ve ever seen.
That’s not a compliment.
It took place in Boston, which meant that Wahlberg didn’t have to actually act or have a different accent.
He played a cop in a completely fictionalized story, instead of having to follow someone else’s real-life events, like in “Patriot’s Day” (2016).
The plot was thin and stupid, which meant that all he had to do was not die on set when the pyrotechnics went off around him.

Spenser was a cop framed for assaulting the dirty police chief. Upon being released from jail, said dirty police chief was killed and Spenser decided it was his sworn duty to figure out who did it and why. He enlisted the help of Hawk (Winston Duke) - an MMA-wannabe who’s fighting dreams existed solely as a set piece that would give Spenser a way to meet him. We also met Henry (Alan Arkin), an old man who spent his entire time on screen impersonating Alan Arkin. And finally Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger), Spenser’s ex, who existed as nothing more than a trophy for Spenser to claim by the end credits - not that he did anything to earn her adoration, just that she was inexplicably love-sick for him and kept waiting around even as he treated her like shit.

Yada yada yada, it’s an American movie, so Spenser saved the day, the bad guys went to jail, and the final scene was a lead-in to what Netflix clearly hopes will be a series of movies.
I can only hope those plans die on the vine - we absolutely don’t need any more of that dumpster fire clogging up the internet tubes.

The opening scene of the movie showed a Boston Police Department SUV pulling into a driveway.
Unless you’re Hellen Keller, you’d be able to immediately figure out that this movie was set in Boston. Then, about 15 minutes later, the word “SOUTHIE” appeared in massive letters over the screen, the way movies do to introduce you to a new location.
But, as someone not from Boston, I don’t know where ‘Southie’ is. Is it a town? A suburb of the city? The pseudo-official (nick)name of a particular part, like ‘Hells Kitchen’ in NYC?
It’s unclear, and entirely irrelevant. No one ever said it out loud and it never came up again.
Then director Peter Berg took it a step more stupid and printed the word “LOBSTAH” over the screen for the last scene where the main characters were all eating lobster.
I get it: it’s Massachusetts, they eat lobster there, but the location-on-screen trope wasn’t used throughout the movie to any effect, and to bring it back in for something that wasn’t a location didn’t make it a joke, it just made it clear that Berg saw the concept comedically misused elsewhere, but failed to grasp why it worked, so he botched his own attempt like a kid who told a funny joke then repeated it with the punchline as “boogers” and waited for everyone to laugh.

Here’s another handful of stupid character tricks:
Spenser threw around insults like it was socially acceptable. Amongst clearly established peers, mean commentary can be hilarious. But from a disgraced cop to any random person: it just made him the asshole in almost every scene. There was nothing redeeming about his behavior, and he could easily have found the answers he wanted by not being a stellar prick.
At one point, Hawk slashed four tires and carved a pictured into someone’s car door, in the middle of the day, in a street-facing parking lot, when the car was parked in front of the plate-glass window of the store the car’s owner was currently in. While the owner certainly deserved it, that would have been a great way for Hawk to get himself arrested, shot, or both.
Cissy was borderline trailer trash. I can’t tell if that was intentional, like that’s somehow part of ‘Southie’ culture (if that’s even a thing), or if the Berg just didn’t know what to do with comedic genius like Shlesinger and thus gave her a lot of gross jokes that just coagulated into a pile of Jersey Shore.
Meanwhile, the cabal of dirty cops all lied like little kids do when they’re trying to get out of trouble and just end up digging the hole deeper, and behaved as if everyone in the entire city was an idiot.
Which, to be fair, the script made everyone out to be an idiot, so I guess that worked.

The soundtrack for this wasn’t so much a “soundtrack” as it was “I don’t know how to actually use dialogue and character actions to tell a story, so I’m going to pick popular rock and contemporary pieces to narrate scenes for me.”
The worst offender was when Cissy inexplicably cornered Spenser in a men’s bathroom in a restaurant and they had sex on the sink. The song “Feels Like the First Time” by Foreigner played.
Get it!? They hadn’t had sex in years because Spenser was in jail, and now the sex feels like the first time! Ha! What a great director Peter Berg is!
Ugh.

Bit character Squeeb (Post Malone) existed, but by displaying all of the very obvious facial tattoos that real-life-rapper Post Malone has, he might as well have just said “I’m Post Malone and I’m in this movie,” which immediately triggers that frustrating ‘referencing too much pop culture’ thing I’ve ranted about before.

We also got the unfortunate experience of meeting two FBI agents who just… existed.
Apparently they were after the dirty cops too, but they never did anything, never proved useful, and one of the agents was just a straight-up dweeb who kept shouting inane nothings while everyone else pretended he was normal. I think that was supposed to be one of the jokes, but it just kept falling flat, over and over again.

Oh, and Spenser had an unnecessarily drawn out fight with a German Shepherd and was inexplicably able to get up and walk away with all of his limbs attached and his organs still on the inside.

What’s particularly frustrating about this movie was the trailer that Netflix cut together for it - the trailer right there on their own app - the ‘play trailer’ button right below the ‘play movie’ button - made this movie look good. Between slick editing and some cutting-room-floor audio, not only were all of the jokes in the trailer, but there were jokes in the trailer that didn’t actually show up in the film.
The one and only line I laughed at was when Henry snarked at someone.
Every other “joke” was some form of situational “comedy” (ie: a tough guy doing something not tough), or a smash-cut of one character saying something then the next scene showing something mildly contradictory. You’ve seen it done in your favorite sitcom, usually causing a character to put their foot in their mouth.

The plot of this movie made sense, sort of. I was able to follow who was the bad guy and how they were trying to pull off their crime.

Beyond that, nothing else was right.
The crooked cops’ motivations didn’t make sense, Spenser and his band of idiot mis-fits stumbled around until they found their next clue, and plot devices happened for no other reason than so Berg could film whatever next fight scene he wanted.
This was worse story-telling than a Bay-hem explosion fest.

If you look this movie up on IMDB, you’ll see that it’s labeled “Action, Comedy, Crime.”
One of those adjectives is correct.
It’s “crime.”
I was robbed of 111 minutes of my life.