Play Dirty Review: Overstuffed Action Caper Saved by Shane Black Gags

Play Dirty Is an Overstuffed Action-Comedy Caper Saved by Classic Shane Black Cheese

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For roughly the first 8 minutes or so of Shane Black’s Prime Video feature Play Dirty, you’d be forgiven for wondering if you’d accidentally started watching the middle of a film, rather than its beginning. The writer-director of everything from Lethal Weapon, to The Nice Guys, to Iron Man 3 drops the viewer cold into a bank heist already in progress, with very little clue of what is going on, other than the unshakeable faith we possess that surely Mark Wahlberg’s mononym of an apparent protagonist, Parker, will see us through to some eventual exposition. And just when it seems like that kind of proper character introduction will probably arrive … a completely random bank employee, family in tow, arrives and upon noticing the robbery declares that he is going to “rob the robbers,” absconding with a sack of cash and triggering a hysterically over-the-top chase sequence that sees the cars spilling onto a horse race track, full of shots so ridiculous they feel ripped from Bollywood action spectacles. Horses trample over the top of cars; CGI jockeys are launched like lawn darts; a horse bolts into the stands while an exasperated bettor tears up his ticket in disgust. It’s one of the most audaciously silly things I’ve ever seen in an action movie, perpetrated by a character who isn’t even given a name in this movie. Which is to say: It announces how seriously Shane Black is taking this endeavor, which is not at all. He hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.

Parker, as it turns out, is a career criminal and heist maestro dreamt up by prolific author Donald E. Westlake (under the name Richard Stark) in a series of no fewer than 24 novels between 1962-2008. In the books, Parker is apparently an icy, collected, hardboiled veteran criminal who doesn’t hesitate to resort to violence, because he’s surrounded by criminals even more cold and ruthless than himself, and he is often betrayed before returning for vengeance. Some semblance of that character still exists in Black’s Play Dirty (a title with no particular bearing on anything, same as its Christmas setting), but if the book Parker is surrounded by even scarier people, the film inverts the dynamic: Parker is fearsome and frequently mythologized, but he’s instead surrounded by joke-cracking criminals who are much more warm and silly, which softens him to some degree just by association. The dynamic is now that of a no-nonsense protagonist surrounded by constant nonsense associates and villains, which fits with Black’s more comedic sensibilities.

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This has the amusing effect of making it feel like Parker is a character from an entirely different genre who has accidentally traipsed into this story–he’s trailed by horns on the score that perfectly parody a vintage hardboiled detective aesthetic, but he’s the only one who acts as if he hails from this cinematic background. His primary motivator is pure spite and petulance: An organized crime boss (Tony Shalhoub) once told him that he can’t operate in New York, and so now he’s here to do exactly that, for no other reason than that he’s not supposed to do so. The film’s humor, meanwhile, thrives on other characters puncturing the classical tropes that surround Parker: At one point a dying henchman attempts to start a speech of some kind with “kill me if you want, but …” and one of Parker’s associates simply replies “okay” and blows him away before he has a chance to continue speaking. It’s easy to laugh at how it cuts through the treacle.

Black’s direction of action sequences, meanwhile, is considerably more lively here than in 2018’s uninspired The Predator, staging gaudy car wrecks and shootouts that combine a more visceral streak of violence with a carefree, freewheeling sense of forward motion. Wahlberg even eventually gets to indulge in some of the more physical comedy himself in a protracted brawl with squirrely, maniacal and intentionally grating henchman Kincaid (Nat Wolff), which for about two minutes suddenly transforms the film into a well-choreographed piece of vintage Jackie Chan martial arts comedy; a brief interlude of Rumble in the Bronx before we get right back to classic heist movie plotting. The alacrity with which Black switches between modes only adds to the humorous, destabilizing sense that anything can happen at any moment–you could absolutely call Play Dirty scattershot or tonally schizophrenic, but Black has essentially weaponized those qualities for their own comedic value.

Sure enough, the screenplay does eventually settle into a more familiar heist routine with the requisite assembling of the crew, although even here, Black brings them in so casually, mid-film that it honestly feels like another gag: A bunch of people we’ve never met before, who all have history with Parker, showing up at once to crash the party. They include the likes of performers Claire Lovering, Chai Hansen, Keegan-Michael Key (reunited after a subpar role in The Predator), and notably LaKeith Stanfield as the likewise mononymous “Grofield,” a character who is in fact the protagonist of four other novels written by Westlake as Richard Stark. Granted, you would not know this from Play Dirty, which mostly utilizes Grofield as right-hand man and comic relief, but Stanfield makes the best of it with his personal magnetism, embiggening his role as an eccentric lover of small-town community theater who just so happens to occasionally run heists on the side. The film is more genuinely interested in Zen (Rosa Salazar), a dangerous woman with a more theoretically noble goal, who runs afoul of Parker in the film’s initial botched heist, potentially earning either his admiration or postponed vengeance. Together, they must assemble to, you know … take on some bad guys and retrieve some objects of value. It’s a heist movie; you know how this works.

Still, if that previous paragraph sounds like a lot of balls for Play Dirty to be juggling, you’re not wrong–when the film feels like it should be about to conclude we’re instead still setting up brand new heists and tacking on additional twists on twists, making it feel notably overstuffed. But even when it runs into ever more gratuitous territory, each scene is still punctuated by enough expertly timed quips to keep the smiles flowing–it speaks to Black’s still-sharp ability to write a joke (or the talents of co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi) that Play Dirty doesn’t become a slog even when it’s so overly plotted. There’s a loose, silly sense of freedom in how chaotic the whole endeavor can feel, as it does when Parker plans a meticulous heist, only for the event to be rescheduled, now falling to his crew when most of them are heavily inebriated. Perhaps the idea of impulsivity or improvisation is the key to everything here, going all the way back to that boneheaded man who sparked a car chase on a horsetrack in its opening moments: Play Dirty feels like an ode to the careless freedom of life as an outlaw, cognizant of consequences but refusing to acknowledge them. That, and a good joke can paper over a lot of inconsistency, or even turn it to your advantage as Black has done here.

Play Dirty is a caper so off-kilter that it never has a chance to become boring, so absurd that you can’t take any element of it seriously, and so entertaining that it manages to make a run time of 125 minutes feel reasonable, if only barely. Granted, I still have no idea of why it was called Play Dirty, or why it here and there remembers for a few moments that it’s set during the Christmas season long enough to play a snatch of holiday music, but you’ll probably be chuckling often enough that you won’t care. By the time you think to ask those questions, Shane Black will already have made good on his getaway.

Director: Shane Black
Writers: Shane Black, Charles Mondry, Anthony Bagarozzi
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shalhoub, Keegan-Michael Key, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane, Chai Hansen, Claire Lovering
Release date: Oct. 1, 2025 (Prime Video)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

Play Dirty Is an Overstuffed Action-Comedy Caper Saved by Classic Shane Black Cheese