Movie Logic - Parker (2013)

Parker is a bad movie. Boring action, paper thin characters, a needlessly convoluted plot...does this sound like something you want to watch? Well, I did, mainly because of Jason Statham, who is a fun action actor and Jennifer Lopez who has a great ass. Yes, I will watch a movie based on how the actresses butts look. I never claimed depth.

The movie follows Jason Statham as Parker, a thief who has been doubled-crossed, left for dead and is out for some payback. He travels to Miami in search of the men who tried to kill him and take revenge (as well as the $50 million in jewels they are playing to steal). He runs into Jennifer Lopez, playing Leslie Rodgers a down-on-her-luck real estate agent who lives with her bundle-of-stereotypes mother. Lopez somehow figures out who Parker is and that whatever he is doing in Miami is a) illegal and b) worth a lot of money. For a cut, she offers to help him.

Movie logic rears it's ugly, irrational head a number of times, but I'll focus on the one that bothered me the most. For the finale, Parker raids the house his former partners are using as a base with the intent of killing them and taking the jewels they have just stolen. What's does J-Lo decide to do? Why, go to the house on her own to "help." How? She is shown to have few skills, none of which would help in this situation anyway. She doesn't know what Parker's plan is and offers no plausible reason for going. Of course, she is there to be captured, threatened with rape and death and, at the last moment, to kill one of the thieves (the rapey one) and just complicate things in the most cliched way possible.

This is only one of many actions J-Lo's character takes that are so silly and unrealistic that they constantly take one of out of the story. When you are dealing with a movie that is already a dull collection of genre cliches, this is fatal, to the movie as a compelling narrative or even as pure entertainment.