Spenser Confidential Review

March 19, 2020 at 9:46pm
By Jason Stettner

Spenser Confidential is a Netflix Original film that is about as generic as an action movie can get. It can be best described as the sort of thing you’ve already seen a dozen times or so if you watch movies in general. It follows an ex-cop Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) as he gets out of jail for attacking his superior. He was attempting to uncover some secret corruption, but things went horribly wrong. He then compiles a weird team mostly going around with his new pal Hawk (Winston Duke) to deal with crime.

They’ve got a structured mission in this one, and it goes about how you might expect. It wasn’t necessarily the worst thing to watch, but it certainly wasn’t very good and not at all that interesting. It was predictable and just sort of went along. There wasn’t much to the narrative and even the action was honestly tame. It seemed alright at the start, but got progressingly boring as the long run time went by.

I’m not sure what I expected, but I was hoping for something maybe a little fresh or interesting. It also caps things off with the lamest sort of conclusion I could really imagine. I guess there were a few moments that provided a laugh, though I wasn’t too thrilled by any of this. It was horribly predictable and ended in an almost silly way when it came to the final act’s moments of conflict.

The acting was ok in this, I suppose. I wasn’t blown away by it as the characters put on heavy accents in their Boston homeland. It did have some violence to it in a number of fight scenes, not much inspiration to be different for those. It’s hard to really dive into as not a whole lot went on within it.

There was some minor detective work from a guy that didn’t understand computers due to jail time I guess despite that being a gap where technology was still very present. They had some scenes were they did surveillance and then some action prior to ending. I guess there was some fiery romance briefly too, that wasn’t anything too enticing and almost out of place quite honestly. It was shot alright, wasn’t too blown away by the presentation. Mostly intimate shots, not a whole lot of scale during combative moments or scene setting.

The Conclusion

Spenser Confidential is a fairly generic sort of movie, it doesn’t do anything new and was extremely predictable. It was another one of those films that you sort of just have witnessed prior to moving on with your life. I didn’t have issues watching it, but I do wish that it would have aspired to be more than it was. I feel like I’ve seen this type of movie a dozen times and Wahlberg in this sort of a role a number of times.

It did have a laugh or two and it is watchable to a degree. It’s just quite excessively long and I didn’t feel it was anything too enticing to watch. A very predictable sort of narrative that takes forever to reach its conclusion. They did have some neat characters here, but didn’t do much with them. The villain was underdeveloped and basically just there, and they could have dived into the motivations of characters more. I had hoped for more, but I’m not sure what I was looking for going into this. Something unique, or fresh I guess was the expectation.

Spenser Confidential Review at Home with Streamed Viewing
Content Access was Provided by Netflix

Rating Overall: 4.5