Moview Review- Parker

Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Chiklis, Jennifer Lopez
Direction: Taylor Hackford
Genre: Action
Duration: 1 hour 58 minutes

STORY: For a thief, Parker is quite a stickler for rules. He doesn’t kill, takes only what he needs and believes in clean getaways. After a somewhat successful caper, he’s double-crossed, shot at and left for dead. And like Bruce Willis, doesn’t die easy. He is rescued, taken to a hospital and heads to Florida to take on his former crew.

MOVIE REVIEW:
You come to expect a certain flair from a Statham film. It feels like Hackford (Academy Award nominee for Jamie Foxx-starrer ‘Ray’) and his writer John J McLaughlin (‘Hitchcock’ and ‘Black Swan’) let him down with this middling adaptation of a Donald E Westlake novel.

His crew has connections is high places, Parker is warned and upon his return is even given hush money to stay away. His girlfriend is threatened and an assassin is sent to kill him. Parkers survives, follows them to Palm Beach, Florida in disguise, under an assumed identity and looks around with the help of a desperate real estate agent (JLo) looking for a way out of her deadbeat life.

It’s stupid that there’s the hint at a love triangle when his character is deeply in love with his girlfriend Claire (something the first half takes goes to great lengths to establish). And moreover, it’s tiring to sit through the entirety of this film (two hours too long), annoying to have to put up with an uneven pace and a seriously imbalanced quality of cast.

Also, why is a ‘serious’ filmmaker and his writer at the helm of something that’s being marketed as an action film? We’ve grown used to seeing Statham in the driver’s seat of a fast-paced action thriller.

Something this film, despite pretensions, isn’t. No wonder, he’s taking a backseat here. Come to think of it, all of them are. It’s almost as if they couldn’t care less. Should you?

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