Prime Video’s Play Dirty Review: Shane Black Delivers A Busy But Slick And Fun Christmas Heist With The Return Of Parker

Not being one to celebrate Christmas in its typical context, I have an annual tradition of celebrating Shane Black Christmas. Since breaking out in Hollywood in the mid-1980s selling his script for Lethal Weapon, Black has made a habit of setting his action movies during the holiday season – understanding that the specific setting has its own kind of heightened atmosphere – and it’s been a special spice used in the majority of his work. He added it to screenplays through the 1990s (including The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight), and he kept it going when he moved into the director’s chair to make Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3 (I’ll add that I include The Nice Guys in the marathon too given its final scene set in late December).

It should probably go without saying at this point that this is an incredibly specific genre that I am always happy to see get expanded – and this year, proverbial Christmas has come early with Play Dirty: Shane Black’s stab at bringing Donald E. Westlake’s a.k.a. Richard Stark’s legendary thief Parker back to the screen. And while it’s not the equivalent of getting everything on my holiday wish list thanks to overcooked plotting, it successfully satisfies thanks to Black’s signature attitude and snappy dialogue paired with a talented ensemble cast that is very game for the sharp-edged adventure.

Dropping us into a lived-in world that expands on the conflicted dynamic between the independent rogue Parker (Mark Wahlberg) and the dangerous, New York crime syndicate known as The Outfit, the film begins as the protagonist successfully pulls off a successful, big payday job only to be betrayed by a member of the crew (I won’t say who here in order to maintain the surprise). Barely surviving the treachery and promising revenge to the widow of a fallen friend, he goes after the traitor only to get roped into a far bigger operation with far greater riches up for grabs.

After a South American dictator lays claim to a sunken treasure thought lost for centuries, a conspiracy is orchestrated that will see him line his own pockets and leave his people with nothing, but revolutionaries hatch a plan to take the treasure before it can be “stolen” and privately sold. Parker has both the skills and the crew (LaKeith Stanfield, Keegan-Michael Key, Clair Loverling, Chai Hansen) to help pull off the job – but being a part of the operation means breaking a deal with Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), the head of The Outfit, to stay out of his city.

Play Dirty's script struggles to workaround movie-goers' familiarity with the heist genre, and it tries to do too much.

Shane Black loves a twisty mystery, from the false flag operation in The Long Kiss Goodnight to the Hollywood murder plot in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang to the auto industry corruption in The Nice Guys, but what’s he has cooked up in Play Dirty with co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi bites off more than it can properly chew and feels overdone as a result. One senses the filmmakers’ efforts to subvert audience expectations formed from decades and decades of heist movies – but instead of zagging in the places where you think it’s going to zig, the strategy instead is more about piling extra twists on top of one another, and it makes an unsteady stack.

Adding insult to injury, it’s still not terribly hard to see some of its bigger surprises coming.

There is a great mix of massive action set pieces and fun, dark bits.

Play Dirty doesn’t quite subvert the genre as much as you’d want from a filmmaker as talented as Shane Black, but what he has definitely not lost his knack for are exciting and fun set pieces that frequently toss in elements of the weird and unexpected to keep things fresh. The movie hits you with this special flavor right from the start – with a robbery interrupted by an opportunist that devolves into a car chase that interrupts a horse race – and those fun ideas keep flowing and hitting even as the plotting teeters. There is an entertaining flow of clever that keeps the film afloat throughout in both big and small ways, from a plan to purposefully crash a train full of garbage to a gag where a man on fire tries to douse himself in a pool of what turns out to be electrified water.

Shane Black's ear for dialogue is as sharp as ever.

Of course, another classic Shane Black-ism is the amazing buddy dynamic that is his bread-and-butter. Being an ensemble-driven narrative and Parker being the independent soul that he is, the movie doesn’t make any overt efforts to carve out that kind of relationship in the cast, but there is plenty of sparking energy created in standout scenes and some wonderful personalities – each of whom work magic with the script's crackling back-and-forths and bon mots.

Mark Wahlberg and Rosa Salazar have a great combative dynamism, the latter playing a freedom fighter who enlists Parker’s help but, despite her best efforts, can’t earn his trust. LaKeith Stanfield is a standout as Grofield, a thespian who operates as a criminal to fund his anti-audience theater efforts, and while Chai Hansen’s Stan is so incredibly dumb and incompetent that he makes a questionable addition to the heist team, his behavior yields some of the film’s funniest moments.

Within the Shane Black Christmas canon, Play Dirty doesn’t represent the filmmaker at the height of his powers, but it is him working square within his wheelhouse (Black and Westlake/Stark is a perfect match) and generating entertaining results. It’s a movie that would have benefited from a little bit more creative energy put towards upending the familiar of heist movies, but it settles for being a solid entry for the genre.