Play Dirty Review: Shane Black’s Heist Movie

Play Dirty is Shane Black’s attempt to bring Richard Stark’s Parker to the big screen. Black is no slouch when it comes to the noir genre, having made two of the best noir movies in the last couple of decades. Rather than adapting a story directly from the series, Black and crew decided to make their own caper by incorporating elements from the overall series. It’s debatable whether this works well here.

Richard Stark’s Parker

Richard Stark was one of the pseudonyms used by Donald E. Westlake, the creator of Parker, in a series of twenty-three books written between 1962 and 2008, starting with The Hunter. Parker is a cold and unwavering crook with a compromised moral barometer.

While he will not double-cross another criminal, he will kill and commit other crimes to see his job through. Most of Parker’s stories are hardboiled crime novels which have been adapted into film at least eight other times and played by a slew of other actors of varying degrees. Most adaptations don’t even call the character by his proper name, opting to use something similar.

The Setup

After a nearly botched heist, Zen, a member of Parker’s team, kills the rest of the crew and takes off with the score. Parker is shot during the scuffle, but lives and vows to avenge a long-time member of his crew.

When Parker finds Zen, the rogue crew member, she tells Parker about a heist for a billion-dollar treasure for a much nobler cause. The only thing that stands in Parker and Zen’s way is the crime syndicate known as the Outfit, led by Lozini, who already has it out for Parker. Parker gathers a crew of people with different skills to get to the treasure first.

The Mourner

While the fingerprints of a typical Shane Black story are all over this film, this outing felt bland to me. For a writer with such a distinct voice and tone, these big swings didn’t connect. If you’ve seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, his deconstruction of the genre, you know he has the chops and understanding to write a great noir story. Black uses elements from Westlake’s pulpy source, but they don’t feel organic.

In a time when people complain about having to see the previous Marvel movies to know what’s going on, it feels like you should have read some of the books or had some knowledge of the character of Parker. Play Dirty seems to take a page or two from the works of Ian Fleming.

Parker is still the quippy and tough-as-nails criminal of Westlake’s paperbacks, but this version feels like a deviation of Fleming’s superspy. Parts of this movie feel like a James Bond story that stays in one city. While the film is very much a heist story with revenge as the motivator, there are these lower-scaled scenes of espionage, a notion that Alan Silvestri’s score plays into.

While the New York setting could have been a great playground for Parker and Black to play in, only a few shots were actually filmed in the city itself. The majority of the film was shot in Australia, which feels like a poor choice. Architecturally, they look too different. I know many efforts have been made to clean up NYC, but there’s a certain aesthetic you don’t get. Subbing one in for the other only highlights their differences. This type of story needs that grit, and this stand-in looks too polished.

The Outfit

The well of actors that Shane Black gets to play with is deep. Throw a rock and you can find a great Lakeith Stanfield performance, and there’s no exception here. His performance as Grofield is definitely a highlight of the film. Rosa Salazar’s Zen is fantastic. While she doesn’t break the mold of the femme fatale, she gives it another angle. Tony Shalhoub does the heavy lifting as Lozini. It can be argued that he is the big bad of the film, a role he plays well and would like to see him explore in a better movie.

I will admit I am not the biggest Mark Wahlberg fan and can count on one hand how many movies I like him in. His portrayal of Parker just didn’t do it for me. Robert Downey Jr. was originally cast for Parker in this adaptation, but I don’t know if he would have fared any better in the role. Parker needs the right amount of grit and charm. Wahlberg has too much grit and not enough charm, and vice versa for Downey. Parker is a master planner with an unforgiving nature. A character that is hard to pin down would need surgical precision from an actor to portray.

The Score: 6/10

Shane Black wrote this with Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry. While there are some great moments in the film, it does fall short. Yet, credit where credit’s due; he’s the only one making these gritty movies of yesterday, which is not a bad thing. It’s his bread and butter, and he spreads it well, even if his vision seems compromised.

While Play Dirty is not as sharp as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Nice Guys. It’s definitely a take on the genre Black has earned the right to take a risk on. Black has been able to catch lightning in a bottle a number of times in his career, and when he hits hard, it leaves a mark. This just didn’t hit for me.

Play Dirty is available for streaming on PRIME VIDEO.

Please see Forrest’s review of Nobody 2, here.