Marking the fifth collab between director Peter Berg and
actor Mark Wahlberg, there’s something… different about their chemistry this
time around. It’s yet another bit of Boston brawn, once again giving Wahlberg
the kind of bedrock he needs to give a decent performance, but it’s also a lot
looser than their previous work. I’ve seen this billed as an action-comedy, but
I personally wouldn’t go that far. Apparently, Berg encouraged more
improvisation on-set and playing around with the tone, which admittedly helps
separate this from his more recent work, but as I’ll get into, that’s not
always for the best reasons.
The plot is reminiscent of Jack Reacher in how it’s about an
outsider dealing with internal affairs within the law. It even cuts the
pretence about how these police yarns always involve some kind of crooked cop
by having that fact be an intrinsic part of the plot from beginning to end.
From Wahlberg’s titular former policeman taking justice into his own hands to
the violent resolution, we’re watching someone who’s seen the police pattern
from the inside and, after spending five years in jail for sticking to his
moral code, he wants to get to the bottom of it.
Where it gets odd is how this quite tense plot and pacing,
involving some pretty grim ideas and imagery, is frequently interrupted by the
aforementioned tonal switch-up. Again like Jack Reacher, a lot of that comes
from the lead’s wiseass sense of humour, something Wahlberg is more than
equipped to handle, and his chemistry with Winston Duke is good, but it never
truly comes together as a proper action-comedy. When it aims for laughs, it
just gets a few chuckles, but it never registers that it’s supposed to
have that reaction. It’s one of those situations where the laughs are so few
and far between that I wrote off the actual hits as incidental rather than
deliberate.
Which is a shame because, as an action flick, it’s pretty
good stuff. Steve Jablonsky, another long-time collaborator with Peter Berg,
sets the right tone with his taut soundtrack (even if the needle drops feel
particularly out-of-place alongside it at times), and the fight scenes
themselves might be some of the best to come out of the Berg/Wahlberg
relationship thus far. Add to that the script, which does well in detailing
what makes Spenser and Duke’s Hawk tick, not to mention how endemic corruption
and ‘looking the other way’ is within the police force, and you have a film
that has two solid sides that never quite fit together properly.
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