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Parker: Mr. Off-Season himself, Jason Statham, returns with his starriest supporting cast since that
Killer Elite movie none of you saw: Jennifer Lopez, Nick Nolte, Michael Chiklis... well, okay, part of the supporting cast of
U-Turn, plus Chiklis isn't exactly money in the bank, but I can't exactly tell you who else was in
Safe even though I saw it, so there you are.
Parker is based in part on the same Donald Westlake novel that was turned into
Point Blank and
Payback, with Lee Marvin and Mel Gibson, respectively, playing characters based on Westlake's Parker, but not called Parker in their movies. For this go-round, Taylor Hackford has the name at the ready, so the movie's called
Parker rather than
The Hunter (possible additional contributing factor: the number of other movies called
The Hunter). Based on what I've read about the Parker series, I kind of wish they'd skipped the betrayed-by-lowlife-associates-left-for-dead-and-now-back-for-revenge step and gotten straight to the rest of the series, where Parker assembles teams and pulls heists; he sounds like a less driftery, more crime-prone Jack Reacher (whom I know nothing about except what I saw in the Tom Cruise movie
Jack Reacher). But if I must watch Jason Statham punch his way through the underworld before watching him pull some heists in possible future movies, well, I guess that serves as an apt metaphor for the sensation of watching any low-rent Jason Statham movie (which longtime readers know I absolutely will do) while waiting for the point where he'll spend more time doing slightly classier, heist-driven B-pictures like
The Bank Job and
The Italian Job.
