Play Dirty Review
Director: Shane Black
Date Created: 2025-10-01 13:23
1.5
Play Dirty Review: Whenever Shane Black releases a new film, anticipation automatically rises. We mean, he has delivered some of the best action-comedy movies of the last few decades. This time, he is directing this Prime Video movie starring Mark Wahlberg in the title role as Parker, with LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Chukwudi Iwuji, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane, and Tony Shalhoub rounding up the cast. Black co-wrote this movie with Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, and it has a runtime of 125 minutes and loosely adapts Richard Stark’s Parker novel series.
Play Dirty Review
Prime Video’s Play Dirty is about a thief scheming an impossible robbery, double-crossing friends, tough antagonists, and high-stakes battles—it has all the classic elements of a gripping crime thriller. The problem is, the film doesn’t execute them very well. The movie sets up Parker as an experienced thief who teams with Zen, a man who double-crossed him in the past, for one last shot at an epic payday. They are quickly entangled in the New York underworld, a dictator, and even the richest man in the world. Sounds like an international adventure, eh? Too bad the writing is so frenetic and complicated that instead of reading as epic, the story is thin and excessively long.
One of Play Dirty’s biggest flaws is its lead performance. Mark Wahlberg has done this same type of character so many times now that Parker is a cut-and-paste operation of what we have come to expect of him. He talks his way through the film with all his tough-guy affectations, but not a great deal of actual charm or originality. Being honest, it appears that he is phoning in this movie on autopilot. I could never pity him, nor will his personality because Parker is a dull character. And since in this film so much is invested in Parker, this flaw kills the rest of the story.
The supporting cast is also wasted. LaKeith Stanfield, who could have added a depth or creepiness element, is in a forgettable part. Keegan-Michael Key tries to be humorous but only manages to flop in his efforts, and Rosa Salazar as a wannabe femme fatale does nothing at all to make an impression. Instead of creating chemistry between the leads, the film simply pairs them in noisy, disorderly situations that try to be humorous but end up being cringeworthy.
And now, you’d think that even the action will ride to the rescue of a movie like this. I mean, a thriller on a heist thrives on tension, plot cleverness, and adrenaline-fueled bits. But Prime Video Movie Play Dirty doesn’t deliver there either. Much of this action is unoriginal and seemingly cut and pasted from better movies. It is tackily edited so that even large set pieces come out muddled.
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One of its highlights is an action sequence on a train that would have been thrilling were it not done with so much jagged CGI and popcorn violence. Far from keeping me on the edge of my seat, it again just served to remind me of how choreographed the entirety of this movie is. Even the violence itself becomes repetitive—Parker gunning or throwing folks around becomes tiresome after a few iterations.
Shane Black is a master at jamming snappily funny humour into his action films, but here the humour is a catastrophe. Too many of its characters strain to be the “funny guy,” and rather than introducing zany charm to the mix, it creates tonal discord. Some of its moments drag out interminably with bickering that is anything but witty, and instead just grating. I was muttering rather than laughing, and that’s never a good sign in a film that so resolutely sets out to combine laughs and thrills.
The movie Play Dirty’s biggest crime is how unsatisfying it is. The films are built to have us on the edge of our seats, concerned about how the gang is going to manage it or if internal conflict is going to be the spoiler. Here, nothing ever really matters. Pacing is wild-swinging—there will be lots of boring chatter that is cut short by spates of frantic action, which don’t actually amount to a whole lot. Rather than Suspense, I experienced a feeling of distance which simply waited to have its reward.
Even the themes don’t work. The film tries to tell us something about greed, about betrayal, about what it takes to live a life of crime, but nothing rings true. At the end, credits running, I couldn’t help but think why this film was necessary when already there is a world of heist films out there that do what Play Dirty does, but do everything so much better.
Prime Video Play Dirty Review: Summing Up
Overall, if you go into Play Dirty thinking it’s a snappy, stylish, adrenaline-fueled ride, you will be let down. Despite its star power and Shane Black heritage, it is a no imagination, no original, soul-killingly forgettable movie. The jokes are mediocre, the action is raucous but dull, and the acting is phoned in. To me, it was disappointing—a peek into how tired formula-thrillers are without imagination behind them.
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