Donald E. Westlake’s Parker mythos drip with grit, style, and unapologetic toughness — the kind of lean, mean crime pulp that demands a brutal hero with swagger. In the hands of Shane Black, Parker should have lit up the screen in fury. Instead, Play Dirty limps in like someone’s off-brand knockoff. It’s dull. It’s flat. It’s disappointing, especially for a Black movie.

 

Set at Christmastime, a beat most of Black’s movies fall into, the film casts Mark Wahlberg as Parker, betrayed by his teammate Zen (Rosa Salazar). Set on exacting vengeance, Parker soon falls into the heist of a lifetime — billions of dollars worth of jewels discovered from a sunken treasure — with the very same Zen, while trying to avoid the criminal organization called the Outfit (with Tony Shalhoub leading the charge). On paper, Play Dirty has everything: revenge, double-crosses, glitzy loot, cold streets. On screen? The plot is a domino line of dumb setups, bland CGI, and moments that feel less like Shane Black and more like a bored streaming heist show filling time between commercial breaks.

 

Wahlberg as Parker is inert. He delivers lines like a man reading off a cue card, not as a master thief with murder in his bones. LaKeith Stanfield’s Grofield is sidekick fodder. The comic relief is so basic it feels insulting to comedy. The supposed tension? Nonexistent. The purported danger? Laughably soft. For a franchise rooted in “dark, stylish, ruthlessness,” Play Dirty plays like a discount version of itself.

 

When Black is on — Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys — he writes with swagger, he builds tension, he balances humor and menace. Here, he seems bored. The action scenes are generic, the heist mechanics implausible, the betrayals telegraphed. Even the film’s biggest set pieces look like videogame cutscenes with texture filters.

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Dig it. There are flashes of alignment. Black’s writing still wrangles a few decent one-liners; the ensemble cast (Salazar especially) occasionally breathes life into stale dialogue; there’s a sense Black tried to recapture the swagger of his earlier hits. The problem is it never connects. The misfires outnumber the hits, and the hits are so weak they barely register a punch. Or a slap.

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Play Dirty doesn’t feel particularly dangerous. Or even all that dirty. This should’ve been fire,  instead it’s lukewarm. This is a flat, forgettable streaming movie that is pretty much what can be expected of Amazon’s MGM studios nowadays.