Jason Statham's Parker is a thief who along with a half dozen or so graduates of clown college hold up the Ohio State Fair. We see early on that Parker is no ordinary bad guy however as he calms a petrified security guard and helps a little girl win a stuffed animal.
In the aftermath of the State Fair heist (which nets a nifty $1 million) his crew proposes he join them in an even bigger heist, one that would require him to use his share of the million dollars they just stole as "seed money". He declines. They apply the pressure but he holds his ground. The others attack in an exciting sequence that ends with Parker left for dead at the side of the road and the bleeding conspirators speeding away in their badly damaged SUV.
Our antihero is rescued from the roadside by a family of down to earth midwestern types who pick him up and bring him to the hospital where he escapes just in time to avoid the police - called to the scene to investigate the stranger with gunshot wounds. He steals an ambulance that's tripped out with everything he needs to recover and he, well, recovers. Once he's feeling better he turns directly down Bloodshed Lane.
He tracks the crew (which, to make things more interesting, we're told has organized crime connections) to Palm Beach Florida where they're planning to pull off that bigger heist mentioned earlier and where Jennifer Lopez's down and out real estate agent Leslie Rodgers is waiting to join the narrative. Parker suspects that the clowns have or will use their money from the State Fair job to purchase a house in the area where they can lay low before and after their big score so he employs Leslie to show him around and talk about the local market under the guise of being an interested buyer. She does a little checking on him in her free time and discovers he's not what he seems, though by that time she's already unwittingly revealed where the nasty clowns are living.
The rest, as they say, is payback.
The Parker of this movie is an awful lot like Frank the Transporter: meticulous, conscientious, basically good, principled and always, always cool as an ice cube regardless of the number of guns pointed at his head or the number of thugs ready to slice and dice him. Hell, even the name - Parker - has driving connotations and that's okay because using the Transporter films as an action template is not such a bad idea. They're cool, they move along, they're brimming with first rate action, usually have a pretty hot babe riding shotgun and they don't make you think too much.
"Parker" succeeds in just about every Transporter area with the possible exception of the hot babe. But I'm not going to quibble about Mama Lopez as she looks very respectable for someone her age. I've always thought that she was a better actor than singer or TV personality anyway and she does nothing here to dispell that notion.
Nick Nolte also has a fairly large part in the film, essentially playing the John Voight character from "Heat". It's good to see him back on the horse though its clear he needs to talk to JLo about which anti-aging cream she uses and get a few boxes of it.
Verdict: ☆☆☆ (out of 5)
