Everyone loves learning a good trick. Like how the best way to crack an egg is to drop it on a flat surface. Or how the best way to cook eggs is slowly, and on low heat so they retain their moisture and stay fluffy. There may be other, non-egg related tricks out there, but I only know one of them, and that trick is this: If you want your audience to respect a character, all you have to do is make them good at their job. (Then again, their job could be making eggs.)
Anyway, that’s the fundamental allure of Parker, the antihero protagonist who starred in 24 novels by Donald E. Westlake, under the pen name “Richard Stark.” Parker is not a good person. He’s also not a particularly wicked person. What he is, at his core, is a professional. He’s damn good at his job. He takes his job very seriously. All he cares about is doing his job well. So we like and respect him for it, even though his job is committing violent crimes.
There’s a scene in Shane Black’s new movie “Play Dirty,” where the writer/director of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “The Nice Guys” proves that he understands what Parker’s all about. A criminal kingpin named Lozini, played by Tony Shalhoub, hates Parker’s guts and he laments that Parker succeeds at everything he does because he’s a criminal, and he acts like it. He doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He doesn’t get distracted by foibles like lust, shame or greed. He’s the ultimate tough guy, a villain if you cross him, an ally if you follow his lead and do your damn job. Either way, never screw with him.
That’s why the biggest problem with “Play Dirty,” an otherwise slick and enjoyable caper flick, is how it handles Parker. Shane Black gets this character. So do his co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi. But for some reason, the film stars Mark Wahlberg as fiction’s toughest tough guy… and Mark Wahlberg can’t pull that off. The script makes Parker out to be effortlessly dangerous, whose reputation doesn’t just precede him, it gets bolstered every time he says or does literally anything. Yet every time Mark Wahlberg tries to act tough, he looks like he’s acting. Wahlberg has a skillset, but “Play Dirty” doesn’t play to his strengths. Ironically, it’s Wahlberg’s star power that robs this movie of its sparkle.
Wahlberg doesn’t sink “Play Dirty,” but he makes it list. Otherwise the film is a pulpy treat. It starts with Parker pulling a heist, but he’s betrayed by a team member named Zen, played by Rosa Salazar. Parker survives their shootout and returns weeks later to take his share of the money and hold Zen accountable for her unprofessionalism, which led to the death of one of Parker’s few friends. When Parker discovers she already spent the money to set up an even bigger heist, he gets mixed up in that, too, and before long everyone’s trying to rob and/or kill everybody else.
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LaKeith Stanfield, Alejandro Edda, Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering are on Parker’s team. They plan a heist, their plans go wrong, so they plan another heist. If you don’t like heist movies, you’re watching the wrong heist movie. It’s very heisty. If you like movies where Mark Wahlberg is perfectly cast, you’re also watching the wrong movie. But apart from that, “Play Dirty” delivers. It’s breezy, it’s witty, it’s fast-paced and packed with light subversions of common crime tropes. It’s even got old-fashioned spectacle, in the form of a train wreck and a car chase in the middle of a horse race — although both sequences have underwhelming visual effects.
Alan Silvestri composed the score for “Parker,” and while his music sometimes fades into the background, his main theme is his best work in over a decade. It’s a throwback piece, a little playful and a little romantic, thickened with personality. It sounds like the overture that would have played 60 years ago in a classic Parker movie starring Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood. It’s a memorable composition that sells Black’s vision for this film better than the generic cinematography, which gets the job done — so Parker wouldn’t be mad — even though it lacks finesse.
The point is, in “Play Dirty” and the process of its production, the people who understand the assignment and did the homework are the real heroes. Meanwhile, Mark Wahlberg Mark Wahlbergs, all Mark Wahlbergily. He’s a comforting presence in a movie where his job was to intimidate. He’s believable when he banters with LaKeith Stanfield, but not when he (allegedly) strikes terror into the hearts of fellow criminals just because of his confidence and intelligence and willingness to kill. It’s easy to imagine LaKeith Stanfield as Parker. It’s easy to imagine Rosa Salazar as Parker. It’s hard to imagine Mark Wahlberg as Parker, even after you just watched him play Parker for two hours.
You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but you have to know how to crack them, or you could end up with a bowl full of shells. And you have to know how to cook them, or else they lose their texture. “Play Dirty” makes for a decent omelette, but the recipe is a little off, and that’s annoying because we’re hungry for a great Parker movie. We’ve had a lot of adaptations, actually, but only a few did the job right (John Boorman’s “Point Blank” remains the gold standard). But if you’re starving for caper flicks, “Play Dirty” is just hard-boiled enough to satisfy. It just isn’t up to Parker’s own high, and highly professional, professional standards.
“Play Dirty” hits streaming Wednesday on Prime Video.
