Parker (2013)

Taylor Hackford approached Parker hoping to make his first film noir, and what he delivered instead is a competent Jason Statham vehicle adapted from Donald Westlake's Flashfire, the nineteenth entry in a series that had already been filmed twice under other names. Statham plays the title thief with the usual economy, a man of professional ethics who refuses to kill bystanders and takes offense when his crew does. The film moves from a state fair robbery to a hospital escape to a Palm Beach jewel auction with the efficiency of a man who has done this before and expects to do it again.

Jennifer Lopez arrives as Leslie, a real estate agent rewritten from the novel as Cuban-American, with Patti LuPone hired to play her domineering mother. This is casting convenience dressed as texture, commercially motivated and content to leave matters there. Wendell Pierce and Clifton Collins Jr. fill supporting roles without the screenplay ever acknowledging race as a subject. The Palm Beach setting offers a mild class contrast, an exclusive enclave on one side of the bridge and real life on the other, but the heist targets the wealthy for the same reason bank robbers rob banks. No environmental concerns intrude. No questions of identity, orientation, or body image are raised. Parker is called a sociopath by his director, which is characterization, not a diagnosis the film cares to pursue.

Leslie proves useful, gets captured, and is rescued, which is the arc the material assigns her, and the film has no thesis to press upon us. It is a heist picture with a body count and a B+ from audiences, roughly the correct grade for a movie that wants nothing more than to be watched on a Tuesday. Preaching is absent. Ambition is modest. The evening passes.