Whatever the good you can say about this film, it is NOT a Spenser and Hawk story. Whoever wrote it took the names of the main characters and glued them onto a random buddy cop story. I like Wahlberg and Arkin is a great actor. But there is nothing in this movie which Robert Parker would recognize as the great characters he created. The most disappointing part is Hawk. In the books and the original series, he is a force of nature - cool, deadly and competent. Winston Duke is probably is a fine actor, but they wrote the character as if he were Michael Oher in the Blindside.
All that said, this is a good enough distraction as a whodunit action film. It has enough action, humor and conflict to fill the time. I do think they were trying to set this up as a pilot for a new Spenser series.
