At one point the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Shane Black has always had a knack for characters. Specifically, for writing winningly funny action heroes – sassy, endearing roles that draw fresh and unexpected work from familiar actors. He did it with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon (1987). He did it with a freshly sober Robert Downey Jr in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), a film that led directly to Downey’s reinvention as an A-list blockbuster phenomenon. And he did it with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in 2016’s The Nice Guys, an underseen buddy-noir movie with a zealous fanbase. Now, it’s Mark Wahlberg’s turn to get the Shane Black treatment. With Play Dirty, Wahlberg has been given, for the first time in years, a role worth sinking his teeth into. But I’m not sure he manages much more than a nibble.
Play Dirty is Black’s fifth self-directed feature, and the first since 2018’s errant action-horror misstep The Predator. A mean-spirited heist thriller with a preposterous body count and a belligerent levity about it, the film sees Wahlberg play the mononymous super-thief known as “Parker”. It’s a character pulled from novels by Donald E Westlake, and one that has been brought to screen a handful of times before (played by actors including Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson and Jason Statham). Never has the character been rendered with so much pep, so much emphasis on comedy. It’s a biting shame, then, that Wahlberg fails to rise to the occasion.
