Spenser Confidential

Year 13, Day 19 - 1/19/21 - Movie #3,721

BEFORE: Alan Arkin carries over from "Havana". I suppose I could cut this one and make my January chain fit better into 31 days, because it's the middle part of a 3-day sub-chain with Alan Arkin, but I couldn't fit this one into December, though it shares two actors with "Instant Family", plus it doesn't link to anything else on my list but horror movies right now, so I'm inclined to keep it here and burn it off.  Everything on Netflix has an expiration date, after all, and this one's been on Netflix since March.  I think maybe they keep the Netflix originals around longer, but for most movies, two years seems to be the max.  So let's deal with it now.  

THE PLOT: When two Boston police officers are murdered, ex-cop Spenser teams up with his no-nonsense roommate, Hawk, to take down criminals. 

AFTER: There's a lot for me to like here, even though this is a re-boot of Robert Parker's "Spenser" character, which varies greatly from the way the character was portrayed in the 80's TV show "Spenser: For Hire", and also from the books, or so I'm told.  This is loosely based on a Spenser book called "Robert B. Parker's Wonderland", written by another author as a continuation of a popular book series, much as they've done with James Bond in the last decade.  By now, all that remains of the original series are the main character names and the Boston setting, it seems.  I'm still curious, so I'm still in.

Back in the day, when Robert Urich played Spenser, they did film much of the TV series in Boston, unlike, say, "Cheers", a much more famous Boston-set show that was obviously filmed on a studio set in L.A.  (Yet tourists for years searched downtown Boston for the "Cheers" bar, even though it was commonly known that the fictional "Cheers" was based on the real-life Bull & Finch Pub, and so it came to pass that somebody had to build a REAL version of the FAKE bar, just so people visiting Boston had a place to go where everybody knew their name, only how could they, if they'd never been there before?)  Urich was rumored to have bought a house (or maybe he rented, I don't know) in my hometown, which was a semi-respectable Boston suburb - that was the gossip around my high school, anyway.  But there was also a fancy mental hospital/rehab center in my hometown, and over the years every famous rock star from Steven Tyler to "that guy from AC/DC" was rumored to have spent time there. Either way, filming "Spenser: For Hire" around Boston is said to have generated $50 million for the Commonwealth between 1985 and 1988, so kudos for that. (EDIT: The internet is a wonderful and terrible thing, because it turns out the rumor was NOT true, Urich bought a house in Andover, MA, and NOT my hometown, so those kids in high school were full of crap. But we didn't HAVE the interwebs back then, so it was a lot harder to disprove something.)

Anyway, back to "Spenser Confidential", which opens with our hero in prison, after beating up an apparently dirty cop.  A flashback shows Spenser ringing his doorbell, confronting him, then pulling him outside (and away from beating up his wife), to pummel him in the front yard.  More on this in a bit, we assume, but first Spenser has to fight off three other inmates in the prison library, while Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time" plays in the background.  OK, you got me - the use of that song totally worked.  And this was supposedly set at MCI Walpole, aka Cedar Junction, which, unlike Robert Urich's house, WAS very close to my hometown.  I don't know if they really filmed in Walpole or not, for that matter I don't know where exactly the prison is, but I do like hearing Walpole name-checked at the very least. One of the combative prisoners is played by Post Malone, and after Spenser gets released, Post is still in jail - I think that's for the best, don't you?  

Spenser survived five years in jail, as an ex-cop, which probably wasn't easy, and transitioning back to regular life isn't going to be easy, either.  His former boxing coach and mentor picks him up, before his ex-girlfriend can arrive to do the same.  Spenser just wants to live in a room in Henry's house, see his old dog Pearl, and learn to drive a truck so he can deliver long-haul freight and make his way to Arizona.  But when that superior officer he beat up in the flashback at the beginning soon turns up dead, Spenser's at the top of a very short list of suspects.  Fortunately he's got an alibi, but he's also dragged into figuring out who DID kill him, because it probably wasn't the second dead cop, as there are obvious holes in the murder/suicide theory.

Perhaps this reboot is set very early in Spenser's career, because he's not a P.I. yet, and then we learn how he meets Hawk in this incarnation.  Hawk's his de facto roommate, also bunking at Henry's house, and he's training to be an MMA fighter, but he needs to learn better punching techniques and some anger management in the ring. (Call-back to "Warrior" from a couple weeks ago...) But he's also got some valuable skills in computer tech, which Spenser doesn't have - five years in jail and he doesn't even know what The Cloud is.  I guess he only studied truck driving and legal loopholes?  The team of Spenser, Hawk and Henry go to work tracking the dirty-money deals up the chain, from the nail salons to the drop-man to the dirty cops and finally the drug suppliers.  The Feds are on the case, too, but Spenser explains to Hawk (and to us) why the FBI will tend to just keep going around in circles and collecting "not enough" evidence in the hopes of someday making a major deal that somehow never comes to pass. So it's up to "private citizen" Spenser to cut through the red tape, take the bull by the horns and do the FBI's job for them.  

A note about Boston women, they don't really come off well here.  The wife of the dirty cop, after being interrupted by Spenser during a beat-down from her husband, jumps into the fight to defend her husband.  Does this make sense?  Spenser's girlfriend, Cissy, is seen after finding out he's going to prison, throwing all his electronics and clothes out the window of their third-floor Southie apartment.  Meanwhile, she's hysterically screaming, "I love you!" to him.  Perhaps this is why I never dated a woman from Boston - OK, so I moved away before I ever got the chance.  Either she's bi-polar, or this film has tapped into something about the dichotomy of relationships - how someone can love and hate their partner at the same time.  Relationships are complicated, later Cissy keeps trailing her ex because she hates him so much, but still wants to have sex with him in a public bathroom.  Go figure, it's a head-scratcher, but who's to say that isn't happening to somebody, somewhere, right now? 

As I did with "Instant Family", upon finishing this film, I watched an Iliza Shlesinger comedy special on Netflix as an immediate follow-up.  There were FOUR to choose from, so clearly she's got a lot to say, I just can't take it when she makes fun of other women with that "bleating sheep" voice.  Tonight I watched her special "Freezing Hot" from 2015. But for someone born in New York City, she did a fine Boston accent here.  Of course Wahlberg's made a name for himself playing characters from Boston, not just here but also in "Patriots Day", "Ted", "The Fighter" and "The Departed".  When my wife and I were in Las Vegas in October 2019 we ate at a Wahlburger's for the first time, and every napkin and tray cover in the joint was filled with tales of the Wahlbergs growing up in Southie and eating "government cheese" - it may be a true rags-to-riches story, but it also gets tiresome after a while. 

I can't find any news about a sequel to "Spenser Confidential" being planned, but if there is one, I'd probably be fine with watching it.  The major complaints against this film seem to be that it deviates greatly from the source novel, but since I never read that book, I don't really mind.  "Motherless Brooklyn" varied from the novel it was based on, and that one worked out OK too.  I hope all the actors here enjoyed their celebratory lobstahs.

Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Instant Family"), Iliza Shlesinger (ditto), Winston Duke (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), James DuMont (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "The Host"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Frank and Cindy"), Post Malone, Michael Gaston (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Hope Olaidé Wilson, Kip Weeks, Rebecca Gibel, Big Shug, Donald Cerrone (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Brandon Scales (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Ayana Brown, Dustin Tucker (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Alfred Briere, Alexandra Vino (last seen in "The Gambler"), Kevin McCormick (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Jeffrey Vincent Thompson and the voice of director Peter Berg.

RATING: 7 out of 10 machetes