Spenser Confidential (2020)

Spenser Confidential arrives as a Netflix buddy action comedy, a genre designation that promises movement and delivers mostly logistics. Mark Wahlberg plays a former Boston cop fresh from a prison stint, paired with Winston Duke as Hawk, an aspiring fighter, and together they work through a plot about police corruption and a dead activist who objected to a casino development. Peter Berg directs with his customary efficiency, which here means the camera keeps finding new ways to look at a parking lot. The whole thing moves briskly and means very little, and it seems aware of this.

The casting deserves a small nod. Winston Duke and Bokeem Woodbine occupy substantial supporting roles, and the ensemble is reasonably mixed, though the film treats this as ordinary reality instead of an announcement. That is to its credit. Hawk's race lives inside the buddy dynamic without the screenplay stopping to explain it, which is the correct approach and also the only approach the story takes. No romantic or identity content of any other kind appears. Iliza Shlesinger's Cissy is introduced and largely maintained as the hot-tempered ex, a designation the film never troubles to complicate.

Where the film gestures at something larger, it is economics. The villainy runs through a casino deal and the displacement of a neighborhood, which lends the proceedings a thin anti-development flavor. It is standard crime-thriller furniture, the sort of engine that has powered potboilers since the studio system, and it never rises to argument. A murdered activist functions as a plot device, not a thesis. The tone stays breezy throughout, allergic to sermons, content to let any social content ride along as scenery. As a piece of cultural classification it is nearly inert, which for a Friday-night streamer may be the highest compliment available. It goes through the motions, and the motions are fine.