Mark Wahlberg in Shane Black’s Ho-Hum Heist Caper

There are several questions you might ask yourself while watching Play Dirty: Why is it that streaming services continue to assemble name casts and throw tens of millions at projects that are synthetic versions of movies we’ve seen too many times to count? Why do those movies always look so flat? Why does Amazon Prime’s blustery action-thriller feel like something director and co-writer Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys) fished out of a bottom drawer where it had been gathering dust for decades, when work on the project reportedly only began in 2022? And perhaps the most puzzling question — why is Mark Wahlberg a movie star?

Published under the pseudonym of Richard Stark, Donald E. Westlake’s series of 24 hard-boiled novels about the tough-guy career criminal known only as Parker has proved a hard nut to crack in screen adaptations. The most enduring of them is John Boorman’s first stab in 1967, casting Lee Marvin in Point Blank. (For contractual reasons, Parker was renamed Walker.) Others who have stepped into the master thief’s shoes on screen include Robert Duvall, Jim Brown, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson and Jason Statham.

If you know going in that executive producer Robert Downey Jr. was originally attached when Play Dirty was first set up as a Joel Silver production, it’s impossible not to imagine Black’s customarily snappy dialogue delivered in the Iron Man actor’s smart-ass deadpan. But as in most of his roles since The Departed and The Fighter, Wahlberg shows little charisma, particularly when he’s flanked by an actor with the irreverent verve of LaKeith Stanfield, who steals every scene without even breaking a sweat.

That’s not to say Wahlberg is the movie’s sole shortcoming. Not by a long shot. Scripted by Black, Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, the film is an original story drawing on characters and events from the crime novel franchise, rather than one particular book. For almost the entire bloated two-hour run time, Black keeps his foot on the accelerator in the hope that audiences won’t notice the haphazard, barely logical plotting.

It starts with Parker and his crew carrying out what looks to be a standard holdup with wisecracks, making their exit with sacks of cash when an employee (Byron Coll) arrives on the scene with his family, figures out what’s going down and tells his startled wife: “This is perfect! I’m going to rob the robbers!”

Parker doesn’t take kindly to the interference, pursuing the culprit on foot and crashing through a horse-racing track, where chaos, wreckage and death ensue before he retrieves the loot. Black and his co-writers soften the cold mercenary side of Parker by giving him something of a moral compass, which prompts him to toss $10,000 to the stranger’s wife before fleeing the scene.

But the unexpected interloper turns out not to be the last of the heist’s hiccups when new team recruit Zen (Rosa Salazar) plugs Parker’s crew full of bullet holes and makes off with the rest of the cash. One of the slain robbers is Parker’s longtime accomplice Philly Webb (Thomas Jane), whose widow, Grace (Gretchen Mol), only half buys it when Parker promises to get her Philly’s share and ice his killer.

Already it’s clear that the film is right in Black’s wheelhouse of switcheroos, double-crosses, fake-outs, swaggering attitude and fumbled moves that somehow turn out to be successful. The director plays up the humor a lot more than Westlake’s callously cynical prose, for better or worse.

Parker tracks down Zen, who’s revealed to be a highly trained soldier from the elite guard of a Latin American country, now operating as a freedom fighter to thwart the corrupt plans of dictator Ignazio De La Paz (Alejandro Edda). The archeological find of a sunken Spanish galleon with a jewel-encrusted carved figurehead known as the Lady of Arintero could erase the country’s national debt and wipe out poverty. But De La Paz plans to steal the treasure while it’s on display at the U.N. and sell it for a fortune to Brit billionaire Phineas Paul (Chukwudi Iwuju). The latter character ushers in a stiff but amusing Mark Cuban cameo.

Salazar gets some cool scenes that show the character’s prowess as a daredevil driver, a kickass fighter and an ace shooter. But if she had said “my country” one more time I would have lost it and screamed, “Name it, FFS!”

After gaining Zen’s trust — or pretending to — Parker assembles a new crew to rob the robbers. (It’s a motif!) That means outsmarting not only De La Paz’s goon squad but going up against “The Outfit,” the New York mob headed by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), who bristles when he hears Parker’s name. The two criminals have a history that resulted in an agreement under which Parker would stay out of New York City and Lozini would let him live.

Parker’s first call is to Alan Grofield (Stanfield), who uses his criminal gains to finance his true love — Illinois regional experimental theater. That anomaly yields a joke or two about Grofield using his acting skills to get into character on the job, but it’s insufficiently developed to add much. Never mind though, Stanfield brings so much playfulness, wit and slouchy-chic sartorial style to the role that I kept wishing this was a Grofield movie, not a Parker movie.

Other recruits include seasoned art thieves Ed and Brenda Mackey (Keegan-Michael Key and Claire Lovering), whose bantering provides comic relief; and flaky getaway driver Stan (Chai Hansen), who at one point busts out some undulating hip-hop dance moves to Boney M., just because.

By emphasizing the caper aspect and the goofy comedy of all this over the intricate plotting that is a hallmark of Westlake’s novels, Black lowers the stakes of a heist that involves halting a speeding NY subway refuse train and busting into a supposedly impenetrable Brooklyn vault. Instead, the generic ‘90s throwback action movie plays like a string of car-crash pileups and urban destruction with little of interest in terms of the human element.

There’s a half-baked attempt to throw Lozini into crisis mode over his organization becoming so corporate that they forgot how to be efficient criminals, but even an actor with Shalhoub’s gifts can’t do much with that. The chief contribution of the Outfit thread is Nat Wolff as a bumbling underworld counterpart to Stan, who laughs off Lozini’s withering disdain but has less luck escaping Parker’s mayhem unscratched.

Despite having skilled hands like composer Alan Silvestri, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Owen Paterson on board, Play Dirty has way more noise than energy or style and is never half as much fun as the filmmakers seem to think.

It’s nominally a holiday movie given that it ends with Parker and Grofield strolling through the New Year’s Eve debris of Times Square — or whatever combination of physical sets and CG the production team cooked up on the Australian shoot. But that just prompts another question — “Wait, this was a buddy comedy?”