There’s so much going on in Shane Black’s action-comedy Play Dirty it could’ve filled two or three adaptations of Donald E. Westlake’s popular Parker novels. The career thief Parker has been played by some of the best actors to ever do it, including Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson, and Jason Statham, but this time it’s Mark Wahlberg who takes on the role. While that’s not the most exciting choice, Wahlberg is the right fit for Black’s machine gun-style of buddy comedy, and paired with scene-stealing co-star LaKeith Stanfield, the film has just enough juice to overlook its narrative incoherence.
The opening setup is pure, adrenaline-fueled chaos, featuring betrayal, murder, a car chase winding through an active horse racing track, and more. It begins as Parker and his crew, which includes his pal Philly Webb (Thomas Jane), Zen (Rosa Salazar), and others, pulling off a successful heist that has netted them each a huge cut of the profits. However, Zen flips the script and screws them, killing everyone in Parker’s team and leaving him in a deep freeze. When he recovers, Parker visits Philly’s widow (Gretchen Mol) and vows to get revenge, no matter what.
It doesn’t take Parker long to find Zen, which seems like an easy shortcut to move the story along. Rather than killing her, he signs on to a massive heist that she is planning to pull off that will mean swiping newly-discovered sunken treasure and using the riches to fund her starving South American homeland. That it also involves robbing The Outfit, a criminal organization run by Parker’s nemesis Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), only makes him more interested in putting his plan for vengeance on hold.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the heist plan involves the introduction of multiple characters and subplots, to the point that you start to get lost. Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering offer some laughs as overzealous masters of disguise Ed and Brenda Mackey, with Nat Wolff as Kincaid, one of Lozini’s hapless henchman. There are also appearances by La Femme Nikita herself Peta Wilson, Peacemaker standout Chukwudi Iwuji, and more, but most of the supporting roles are small and not particularly well-defined.
The exception is Stanfield as Westlake’s other bestselling character, Grofield, a thespian who commits crimes to fund his struggling theatre, so he can keep putting on shows that nobody attends. He’s an ACTOR first and foremost, and gets way too invested in the roles he’s forced to play as part of Parker’s crew. Unlike the others, he’s got a big, unique personality that makes you wish the movie would shift its focus to him. Stanfield plays him with a laid back cool that easily shifts to absurdist humor and back again.
Unfortunately, neither Parker nor Zen is too compelling. The screenplay co-written by Black, Charles Mondry, and Anthony Bagarozzi loses track of their motivations along the way, which is a shame because both have pretty good reasons to be going along with such a deadly gamble. Instead, the film sets aside the obvious conflict, only to bring it back for an unsatisfying swerve in the film’s final act.
Fortunately, Black hasn’t lost his gift for writing funny banter, and the action is non-stop. There are multiple setpieces that leap right off the screen, from the insane racetrack chase to another involving a speeding cargo train that requires the perfect shot to be knocked off the tracks. The body count is massive, with so many deaths that you start to become numb to it. But there are also a few surprising deaths of characters you expect to be hanging around for a while, so Play Dirty manages to stay exciting and keep you on your toes. While it might not be Lethal Weapon or anywhere near Black’s best in this genre, Play Dirty has all of his hallmarks (it’s also a Christmas movie!) and for his fans it’ll scratch the itch until he comes back with something even better.
Play Dirty streams exclusively to Prime Video on October 1st.
