Halfway through Play Dirty, we realise that the protagonist teaming up for a heist with a woman who, a while ago, killed some of his friends and failed to kill him, is not as crazy as the heist and everything leading up to it. This is, after all, a film written and directed by Shane Black — the man who appeared as a background character with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, who went on to create the immensely successful Lethal Weapons movie franchise, aside from acclaimed credits like The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys, and The Predator.
The point is, in his films, madness is to be expected — with an ample dose of humour. People get killed in his movies, sometimes in hilarious ways. Play Dirty, streaming on Prime Video, is going to split the camps into two — those that find it off-putting and those that know it's imperfect and still get a kick out of it.
I belong to the latter. And I happen to be a Donald E. Westlake purist. Some of the author's books from the ‘Parker' series were previously adapted into Hollywood crime classics: Point Blank (1967), The Outfit (1973), and Payback (1997). Those adaptations specifically mentioned their source material. Black's film, on the other hand, simply cites the “Parker book series” — featuring the tough guy criminal Parker, the versions of which were played earlier by Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, and Mel Gibson — as inspiration. Black may have combined ideas from one or more books, like Paul Thomas Anderson did with Thomas Pynchon's work in One Battle After Another.
The idea in these books is simple. Parker happens to be in a profession that requires him to navigate perilous roads rife with multiple roadblocks and backstabbings. Play Dirty, too, begins with a shocking act of betrayal. Mark Wahlberg plays Parker with just the right degree of cynicism demanded of the character. Of course, when compared to Lee Marvin or Robert Duvall, Wahlberg's portrayal may not seem that impressive. But Wahlberg, in my book, gets the job done. We compare Sean Connery to all the actors who played James Bond, rather than appreciating them individually. (It took me a while to see that the 007 interpretations of George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton are good in their own way.)
The film, featuring multiple Shane Black trademarks, including the Christmas setting, opens with a classic Shane Black moment: An employee of the company being robbed slaps one of the bad guys in the hope of impressing a female colleague, at the behest of another character, only to get admonished by the woman for putting both their lives at risk. Black later stages a fairly tense car chase at a horse race, with the animals running amok and meddling with high-speed getaway plans. Across numerous sequences in Play Dirty, cars collide, bodies are flung across vehicles and from buildings, bullets fly in different tangents...
All of this is staged with a deadpan, cartoonish approach. Play Dirty is aware of its cartoonish behaviour and takes glee in that knowledge. Suffice to say, it's Black's wildest crime comedy adventure so far.
There are bad guys in the film that look like bad guys, and there are those who don't. In that regard, as well as the overall atmosphere, the film’s essence is very much that of the crime and action movies from the 1970s to '90s, despite being set in the present era. Characters standing on rooftops are framed against possibly CGI-rendered backdrops of bluish night skies and skyscrapers, evoking the look of comics and yesteryear action classics.
The craziest sequence involves a heist involving an elevated train and speeding cars, a situation that immediately recalls the iconic chase from The French Connection. Of course, Black is not aiming for the filmmaking finesse of William Friedkin, because nothing about the entire sequence screams real.
There are movies that demand your brain to be left outside the door, but are so confused and inconsistent that they require the application of every brain cell to figure out the makers' actual intentions. There is no such confusion when it comes to Play Dirty. It's dark comedy done right.
Film: Play Dirty
Director: Shane Black
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shalhoub, Keegan-Michael Key
Rating: 3.5/5