PARKER: Take Off Your Dress

Parker (2013) – Directed by Taylor Hackford – Starring Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Michael Chiklis, Wendell Pierce, Clifton Collins Jr., Bobby Cannavale, Patti Lupone, Carlos Carrasco, Michah Hauptman, Emma Booth, Daniel Bernhardt, and Nick Nolte.

Fifteen years.

I was not expecting the number to be that high, but it’s been fifteen years since Jennifer Lopez appeared in Out of Sight. Fifteen years since she delivered the best performance of her career and here she is, starring in another crime thriller, starring as another good woman who gets tangled up with another bad man. Fifteen years ago, she starred opposite George Clooney, under the direction of Steven Soderbergh, and in an Elmore Leonard story, and while I believe you have to look at every film on its own, let’s be clear about a few things.

Jason Statham, who I like, is not nearly the actor George Clooney is.

Taylor Hackford, who I like, is not nearly the director Steven Soderbergh is.

Donald Westlake, who I like, is not nearly the novelist Elmore Leonard is.

And PARKER is not nearly the film Out of Sight is.

Yet despite all of that, here sits Jennifer Lopez, in a movie that is, in no way, the equal of Out of Sight, delivering a performance nearly as good. It begs the question – is there any actress in the last 20 years who’s done a poorer job maxing out their talent than Jennifer Lopez?

I absolutely loathe when people tell others how to live their life. I find it noxious when sportswriters, who are the biggest criminals in this regard, tell athletes or coaches that they should retire, that they’re somehow spoiling their legacy by continuing to play, so I am not here to tell Jennifer Lopez she has lived the last 15 years of her life incorrectly. She’s a woman with many talents and many interests and only she can determine whether those choices were the right ones, whether the artistic and business decisions she’s made have brought her happiness. What I am saying – and I’m saying this from a purely selfish point of view of a guy who’s interested in her acting far more than her music or clothing or talent judging – is that she has great talent as an actress, far greater talent than is revealed in her filmography.

Since Out of Sight, she’s been run through the Hollywood Mill: where men who show that particular mix of acting ability and box office potential get tossed in action movie after action movie, women get tossed into romance flicks and romantic comedies and thrillers/horror movies. Lopez followed up Out of Sight with a unique choice (The Cell), but since then, it’s been largely romantic-driven material. There’s been a few box office hits sprinkled in, but it’s been rare that she’s delivered a performance that tapped into the talent that was so clearly on display in Soderbergh’s film.

Which brings me to PARKER, a film that either has no idea what it wants to be or no ability to deliver it. It’s a movie that isn’t awful, but it’s also a movie that has no consistent or coherent vision, a movie that is completely lacking in the style it so desperately needs if it wants to be a crime film, and the energy it needs if it wants to be an action film.

Folded into this inconsistent mess, however, is a really great performance from Lopez. She plays Leslie Rogers, a woman who’s forced to start her life over as she nears 40 years of age. Her ex-husband turned out to be a better cover than book, and she’s been forced to move back in with her mom (Patti Lupone) and work low on the food chain at a high-end real estate agency. Cash is tight (the car she’s leasing and the clothes she’s wearing are above her current pay grade, and she has to help pay off her ex’s bankruptcy), and she’s grown desperate. She steals Parker (who’s pretending to be a rich Texan to scout real estate and find his enemies) from a co-worker and while she complains about the men who hit on her while she’s showing them property (and having to allow some of their advances so as not to lose them as clients) she throws herself at the rich Texan.

It’s pathetic and desperate and Lopez delivers it all beautifully. There’s a real sadness to Leslie, and I believe that she sees first the rich Texan and then the British criminal as a way out of her predicament. It makes me wonder how the last fifteen years would have been different for Lopez if her opportunities and choices had done a better job tapping into her talent instead of relying on her star power.

Of all the things wrong with PARKER, Jennifer Lopez is not among them.

It’s not a film’s fault if it’s marketed poorly, and the movie PARKER purports to be in its commercials is not the film you’ll find when you watch it. This is not a sexy crime thriller. In the commercials there’s lots of sexual allusions: about how “it’s not the size of the gun, but how you use it,” about a sexy shower scene, and about Lopez’s body.

But there’s nothing sexy about PARKER. Sure, there’s good looking leads here, but the film isn’t sexy. The line about the size of the gun? It’s not said from Parker (Statham) to Leslie, but Parker to a guy he’s just shot who claimed “mine’s bigger.” The sexy shower scene? It’s not between Parker and Leslie, but Parker and his actual girlfriend, Claire (Emma Booth), and there’s nothing sexy about it. And Lopez’s body? When Parker tells her to “take off your dress,” the camera puts Lopez’s entire body in the frame, but there isn’t anything sexy about the scene. Parker says he needs to know if she’s wearing a wire, and he really means he wants to know if she’s wearing a wire. There’s no tension, sexual or otherwise.

I’m left struggling about what this movie is supposed to be. Is this supposed to be the movie that takes Statham into the A list of action stars? Is it supposed to be the movie that shows us he’s every bit the actor as he is the puncher and kicker? Or is it supposed to be just another Statham film dressed up with a few stars to try and get bigger box office cake?

Whatever it’s trying to be, it isn’t it.

As I mentioned, I try and judge every film on its own merits, yet there’s so much about PARKER that begs you think of other, better options that it’s hard to escape.

When you do a crime movie that attempts to take a “good guy bad guy” and use him as the protagonist, you’re stepping on Elmore Leonard’s turf, and Westlake isn’t Leonard. What this film desperately needs is some Elmore Leonard characters (or, since the movie is set in Florida, some Carl Hiassen characters) to surround the driven, focused Parker. I like Jason Statham and I think he’s a good enough actor to escape the action genre, and I like the performance he gives here as the principled criminal, but if you’re going to have that kind of main character, you need to give the audience something somewhere else to balance that off – make it stylistic or surround him with personable characters. Other than Lopez’s Leslie, PARKER completely fails in this regard.

The issues with the lack of visual style in the movie has to fall to Taylor Hackford. He’s a fine director and gets fine performances from all of the actors in the film, but PARKER has all the visual style of a Lifetime Movie of the Week. The camera is largely flat and static. The action scenes have no immediacy to them, and except for one moment where Parker uses a piece of a toilet to crack his opponent in the face, the violence hits with the impact of getting punched in the face by a man with no arms. The story is slow and dull, and it begs for a film that wins you over with visual style. The few shots we see of Parker with his shirt off shows us that he’s got nasty scars all over his body, and the scenes beg out for the camera to linger. When Claire looks and them or runs her hands over them, the camera needs to linger there, too. Hackford could play with perspective, giving us the establishing shots intercut with extreme close-ups of the scars, but he doesn’t. It’s just, “Here’s a shot of Statham without his shirt in a shower and he’s got scars, what’s next?”

My least favorite part of the film is the ending. After Parker gets his revenge and he and Leslie are sitting in a car with the jewels that Michael Chiklis’ crew stole, he tells her how it’s going to go down, laying out how she’ll hide the jewels, how he’ll send someone to get them, that he’ll fence them, how the cut works, etc. Then he gets out of the car and she pulls away.

That happens, and if the movie had ended right there, it would have been the best part of the movie. It would have been a rare moment of style bringing out the best in both characters. But even though we’ve just spent the entire film learning that Parker is a man of his word, that “when I say I’m going to do something, I do it,” the film then has to show us how it all plays out. For some reason, even though you completely trust that he’s going to do what he says, the film has to show us Leslie getting a package full of money. It’s dumb and unnecessary and has the feel of either filmmakers who don’t know what they’re doing or producers who’ve demanded its inclusion because of what a dumb focus group has told them.

The end result is a film that isn’t bad but is unsatisfactory, a film that needs style but lacks it, a film that needs characters but lacks them, and a film that never equals the sum of its parts.

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My latest collection of reviews is now available for purchase. I cover every Marvel comic movie, from The Avengers to Howard the Duck, from Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk to Ed Norton’s Hulk to Eric Bana’s Hulk to Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk. All the big budget movies are reviewed, all the 1970s made-for-TV movies are reviewed, and all the straight-to-video animated titles, too. Thanks for checking it out!

HULK: We’re Gonna Have to Watch That Temper of Yours

Hulk (2003) – Directed by Ang Lee – Starring Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, Josh Lucas, Nick Nolte, Daniel Dae Kim, Stan Lee, and Lou Ferrigno.

Ang Lee’s HULK occupies a curious place in the annals of superhero movies. Lots of people seem to hate it, a few of us adore it, and most people seem to have either forgotten about it or see no reason to go back to it. It seems to have come to occupy the antithetical position to Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Most people love The Dark Knight, but those who hate it, HATE IT. Similarly, those of us who still defend HULK, seem to go a bit overboard in our praise of it.

I will not be arguing that HULK is the greatest superhero movie ever made. There are problems with HULK, and some of them are quite serious, but I love this film for the uniqueness of its vision and the performances of its leads. Of all the superhero movies, HULK is one of the few whose look is completely its own, and even when the narrative gets a bit clunky, the visuals make HULK an engaging film.

The most curious aspect of watching HULK is that Ang Lee doesn’t seem all that interested in the Hulk; instead, he’s much more interested in the relationships between parents and children and how the sins of the former forever effect the latter. The narrative in HULK is thus rather tidy, as David Banner (Nick Nolte) and Thunderbolt Ross (Sam Elliott) battle professionally in the 1960s, watch their children Bruce (Eric Bana) and Betty (Jennifer Connelly) battle personally in the 2000s, and then interfere in their children’s lives as they seek to confront their past sins.

The fault of this narrative strategy is Lee and Eric Bana’s conception of Bruce Banner. Of all the four leads, Bruce is the least interesting and Bana gives the weakest performance – though it’s also clearly the performance that Lee wants, so its perhaps unfair to lay too much blame at Bana’s feet. The fault with Bruce’s character is that he is the Eternal Victim in this film; even at the end, after this entire journey of learning his real identity and gaining the Hulk’s identity, Bruce is still a bit of a whiner in the film’s final act. Captured by the army and strapped to a chair, Bruce’s dad is brought in and he mocks Bruce’s constant complaining.

Bruce as the milquetoast at the center of the film works for the most part because the other personalities are so strong. Lee doesn’t seem all that interested in making a superhero film with all the bells and whistles and popcorn that we’ve come to expect, and the film envisions the Hulk as the ultimate result of what happens to someone who’s been put upon his whole life and internalized all that anguish instead of fighting back.

The film’s best moment is simple and almost lost amid in the noise of the action-heavy back-half. General Ross and his daughter are talking after they’ve captured Bruce and the entire weight of Ross’ decision back in the ’60s hits home. Contrary to his “Thunderbolt” nickname, Ross’ realization seeps out of him in a low growl as he acknowledges in short, terse words that when he put David Banner in jail and consigned Bruce to foster care that he was doing his duty but failing his humanity.

Back in the 1960s, the lives of Ross and David Banner became intertwined while they were working on an army base. David wanted to push his genetic research on to human testing, but that request is denied and David begins testing on himself. Shortly thereafter, David’s wife becomes pregnant and when the child is born, David realizes that he’s passed on his mutated DNA to Bruce. Ross eventually discovers what David has been doing and shuts the scientist down, and in anger, David sets off some kind of self-destruct procedure and rushes home to argue with his wife, which eventually leads to her death.

Bruce represses most of this, and he grows up accessing these memories only as nightmares.

Lee skips us quickly past Bruce’s childhood and college years, jumping ahead to his post-collegiate career where he and Betty work in a lab together. They’ve been romantically involved, but have recently broken up. Bruce is continuing his father’s work without realizing it, as he’s always been told that his father died in that explosion on the army base when he was a kid. Their research shows promise but hasn’t been fully realized (they use their nanomeds to heal a frog and then it blows up), and this leads to the one really big mistake of the film – the inclusion and conception of Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas) as a completely over-the-top, cartoonish bad guy.

Talbot is such an anomaly in the film that every time he comes on the screen and does his slick, greedy routine it knocks the film off its tracks. He’s such a buffoonish dick that in a film where everyone struggles with their own emotions, fears, desires, and duties, Talbot’s full-on embrace of his own goofy evilness seems completely out of place. In his final moments, he’s going after the Hulk while using a crutch and hobbling thanks to a leg cast and just looking like a kid’s cartoon come to life. A character that loves who he is should work as wonderful offset to everyone else’s struggles, but it goes too far and Lucas comes off as hammy instead of driven.

Bruce gets his trigger dose of gamma radiation in his lab as he rushes in to save a co-worker not named Rick Jones. There’s no instant transformation into the Hulk; instead, we quickly cut to Bruce in a hospital bed where he happily announces he’s never felt better. His dad decides to re-enter his life at this point, and then decides that Betty needs to die, and this leads to the infamous Hulk vs. Poodle sequence. It’s a weird sequence and if the film was going to cut one part of itself out, this is the part it should dump. Bruce’s transformation into the Hulk is a bit understated and instead of getting a monster, Ang Lee’s Hulk is sort of … confused, at first, and then driven to save Betty from David’s gamma dogs.

Like I said, I could have done without the gamma dogs – the idea of the Hulk battling a gamma poodle sounds better as an idea than in actuality, and the film keeps this entire sequence in the dark, making it a bit hard to see and follow along. As sketchy as this sequence is, however, it does lead to Betty’s monumental decision to turn Bruce in to her father. I love how Lee plays most of these big decisions quiet and doesn’t oversell them. He lets his actors act and deliver these important moments in a truthful way that I really admire.

Beyond Lucas’ campiness and Bana’s reserved nature, the acting here is very strong. Connelly, Elliott, and Nolte are all fantastic and hit the perfect notes throughout the film.

After Betty has delivered Bruce to her father and Talbot goes above Ross’ head to take control of testing the Hulk, the Hulk busts free, kills Talbot, and then bounds off for the desert, where we get lots of totally satisfying action for nearly an hour. We get the Hulk vs. tanks and helicopters and fighter jets and it works just fine. The CGI certainly isn’t perfect. At times, it looks like the Hulk has been laid onto this world instead of being a part of it, but by the end of this extended chase/fight sequence, when the Hulk has hit San Francisco and repelled all of the army’s weapons but is brought to his knees by the presence of Betty, the connection between Bruce and the Hulk feels seamless.

In truth, the film should have ended right there, with an exhausted Hulk transforming back into Bruce and collapsing in a tearful Betty’s arms. That ending was perfect. Even the look from Ross in the background as the weight of a life given completely to duty, a life that cost him his relationship with his daughter and caused him to treat a 4-year old kid like a problem instead of a kid.

The film doesn’t end there because we have to wrap up the plot between Bruce and his crazy dad. David Banner plays such a small role in the film after Bruce is captured that when he gets brought back for the final act, it takes me out of the narrative a bit. I would have rather seen this plot resolved before the Hulk vs. army battle because ending with Bruce in Betty’s arms feels more satisfying than Bruce fighting Daddy the Absorbing Man and then running away to the jungle to help sick kids. Ending on Bruce and Betty shows the damage that parents inflict on their children, and shows that children can overcome whatever burden has been placed on them to find comfort in each other.

Even with the multiple missteps, however, I really like HULK. I think Ang Lee’s visual style is completely engaging; he uses all sorts of wipes and crossfades, and he segments the screen so we feel like we’re in a live-action comic book. Danny Elfman’s score is phenomenal, and the whole look and feel of HULK is a pleasure to watch. As we get nearer to the release of AVENGERS, it’s important, I think, to take a minute and think about the superhero films that don’t look and feel like the AVENGERS franchise. One of the reasons why the superhero genre hasn’t gone away, yet, is that we can see that inside of a familiar genre there’s lots of room for filmmakers to be unique. Nolan’s Batman films don’t look or feel like Burton or Schumacher’s Batman films let alone the AVENGERS films or X-Men films or Blade films.

HULK has a bold and unique look and feel, and it’s a heck of a story, too.