“Movie jail” might not be a real thing, but somehow writer-director Shane Black still managed to land himself in it. His previous film, 2018’s The Predator, a messy franchise flick that a few of us enjoyed, was seen as a catastrophic bust; before that, he made The Nice Guys (2016), an enchantingly rambling neo-noir comedy that everyone seems to love now but practically nobody bothered to see. Those two flops were apparently enough to undo whatever goodwill he generated from the billion-dollar success of Iron Man 3 in 2013. So now Black is back with the new Mark Wahlberg–starring action comedy Play Dirty, which is being released exclusively on Prime Video and has what appears to be a $2 marketing budget; almost nobody I know has heard of it.
Black’s screenplays for the Lethal Weapon films, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight made him a wealthy man back in the day, while also turning him into a poster child for the violent excesses of 1980s and ’90s blockbusters. And Play Dirty is a return to the jokey banter and ludicrous action theatrics that established his reputation in the first place, though it does feel like it’s in a game of one-upmanship with a type of film that no longer really exists; it’s like something from an alternate universe where the ultraviolent American studio action movie got crazier and crazier until we wound up with something as insane as Play Dirty.
It’s based (loosely, I gather) on Donald Westlake’s Parker novels, borrowing story elements from different installments, although it doesn’t have the near-sociopathic terseness that defined Westlake’s work. Rather, it’s elaborate and darkly zany, the kind of movie in which Mark Wahlberg hands someone back a piece of their ear after it gets blown off. The film opens with a nutso racetrack robbery that spills out into the horse race itself, with cars and jockeys and horses flying (and dying) left and right amid the gunfire and chaos.
When that messy job ends in an unexpected double cross that results in the deaths of his entire crew, professional thief Parker (Wahlberg) goes looking for his money and revenge and finds himself (several corpses later) in the middle of something a lot bigger and more complicated involving the newly discovered riches of a 15th-century Spanish shipwreck. This underwater treasure, found off the coast of an unnamed Latin American country and worth around a billion dollars, is going on display at the United Nations, and a bunch of people want to steal it. And lo, there are truck chases and car chases and club shoot-outs and multiple people falling off buildings and an epic train derailment and approximately 197 shots of Mark Wahlberg using some poor bastard’s body as a shield as it’s plugged full of bullet holes. It’s less a story and more a pageant of different types of bloodshed. At one point, Mark Cuban randomly shows up as himself and promptly gets shot. (Spoiler.)
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But is it any good? Play Dirty wears its stupidity boldly, proudly, almost aggressively. It dares you to find anything remotely plausible or realistic or even insightful about it. You either get on its wavelength and ride with it, or you run screaming. I mostly rode with it. As a director, Black has an easygoing way with banter and plot. He knows not to dwell too much on any one element, partly because the story (or “story”) will only work if it races ahead of our ability to think about it. Wondering how our hero survived one particularly bloody and explosive scrape? Sorry, look fast — he’s just about to wind up in another one. Even the film’s janky visual effects and phony locations (especially the scenes set in “New York”) feel of a piece with its “fuck you” energy. Wahlberg seems game, too. As he gets older, those sharp eyebrows of his look even more cartoonish than they used to. You can’t tell if he’s baffled or angry, which is not a bad emotional space for this character, who exists largely to charge forward and carry the momentum of Black’s ridiculous plot.
Still, watching Play Dirty at home on a TV screen, I didn’t really laugh all that much, even though I did find it funny. Rather, I sort of sank into a half-dazed mood of pleasant acceptance. Its stupidity was entertaining, but its stupidity also freed me from having to think about it. It was there, and I didn’t turn it off. Roger Ebert used to talk about the active viewing of film versus the passive viewing of video. He was talking about formats, but in many ways, the cinema-versus-home dichotomy is a similar one. Could a movie like Play Dirty exist today as a wide theatrical release?
I wish it would, but I’m not so sure. Watching this with a large group of people would probably be an entirely different experience. I can’t help but think back to the experience of seeing the new Naked Gun earlier this year with an audience. The two pictures are more similar than you might think. (If anything, The Naked Gun might be slightly more plausible than Play Dirty.) Though one exists largely to deliver gags and the other to deliver an adrenaline rush, in both cases the energy of the audience carries them along their silly trajectories. If at any point you start taking either film too seriously, the illusion is completely lost. At the same time, though, we’ve sort of forgotten how to laugh at and with movies nowadays. Play Dirty might make you feel pangs of nostalgia for a particular type of action flick, but it also reminds you why they mostly no longer exist.
