Play Dirty (Amazon MGM Studios, Big Indie Pictures, Modern Pictures, Screen New South Wales, Servo Production Services, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I spent most of the last week out of town at a religious convocation of the Unity Fellowship Church, and as a result I hadn’t been able to update the moviemagg blog for over a week. We stayed in an old house we took as a vacation rental, and it included a television in the living room but one that was not connected to any regular network broadcasts. As a result, I was unable to watch the Law and Order shows on Thursday, October 10, as usual. Instead Charles found an intriguing and reasonably entertaining “caper” film on Amazon.com’s Prime streaming service called Play Dirty, directed and co-written by Shane Black and loosely based on the character of Parker, created by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym “Richard Stark.” Black’s writing collaborators were Chuck Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, and the three came up with a bizarre tale in which Parker (Mark Wahlberg) and associates Philly Webb (Thomas Jane) and Zen (Rosa Salazar) hatch a plot to rob a horse-racing track of its daily bet collections. (Charles questioned whether a racetrack would still be collecting its bets in cash in 2025.) The heist goes off successfully, though in a series of grimly amusing scenes Parker’s getaway car ends up driving on the racetrack and alternately spooking and actually crashing into the horses. But Zen brutally shoots Philly and the others involved in the robbery, and Parker escapes only by falling into a river and letting its currents carry him away. Parker recuperates at the home of Philly’s widow Grace (Gretchen Mol) and swears to her he’ll avenge her husband’s murder. To this end, Parker seeks out an old friend named Grofeld (LaKeith Stanfield), who runs a struggling theatre company that somehow manages to stay in business even though almost no one ever attends its plays. (The clear implication is that Grofeld is using it as a front to launder money.)

Parker and Grofeld track down Zen’s associate Reggie, who tells them that Zen is actually a trained assassin for a Latin American country (technically unspecified but pretty obviously Peru). Zen killed everyone involved in Parker’s heist but Parker himself and made off with the loot to underwrite an even bigger crime: the theft of priceless treasures dredged up on the sea floor from the wreckage of an old Spanish galleon. Zen’s country is ruled by a corrupt dictator named De La Paz (Alejandro Edda), and though he’s technically donated the treasure to the United Nations for display as an art exhibit, he plans to steal it and use the money to keep himself in power. To do this he’s hired a criminal syndicate called “The Outfit” headed by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub). Zen’s plan is to steal the treasure herself before De La Paz can get his hands on it and use the money to feed her people. Their contact to pull this off is Bosco (Andrew Ford), only Parker shoots and kills him before he and Zen can get the necessary information. Parker traces Bosco’s lieutenant Kincaid (Nat Wolff) and drops him out of a high-rise window, but Kincaid miraculously survives. The plot is that The Outfit will enter the location through a weak spot in the New York subway system and Parker’s crew will haul the loot away in garbage trucks after they derail the subway train. Only “The Outfit” moves the date of the heist up one day, so Parker and his crew have to put their plan in action a day early. Zen seduces Parker as part of the plot, arousing the jealousy of her boyfriend Mateo (Gabriel Alvarado), who kidnaps Parker and takes him to The Outfit. Previously, Parker and his crew found out that The Outfit got wind of what was going on and replaced the priceless treasure with worthless rocks.

The only thing they can still steal and make any money from is the $500 million golden figurehead from the ship that carried the treasure in the first place, which The Outfit had planned to sell to billionaire technocrat Phineas Paul (Chukwudi Iwuji). They do so, but when they have it Parker discovers it’s a fake (can you say The Maltese Falcon?). Then they trace the real one, only it’s been booby-trapped with explosives and, rather than let The Outfit and their corrupt employer get it, Parker blows it up, though he’s eventually able to profit from the heist by harvesting the jewels it contained. Zen tries to get Parker to flee with him and start a new life somewhere else, saying that she’s now genuinely in love with him and wasn’t just faking it for her own ends. Parker grimly tells her that he was faking it, and kills her to avenge Philly and the other people from the original heist whom Zen killed. When Play Dirty was over I commented to Charles, “It’s The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle meet John Wick.” The sheer relentlessness of the death toll severely hampered my enjoyment of it, and I couldn’t help but recall that when John Huston made The Maltese Falcon he was able to create a plot (as Dashiell Hammett already had with his source novel) that was suffused with violence and the threat of it even though only three people actually get killed. Charles pointed out that Play Dirty ripped off a lot of other heist movies as well, but those were the models that stood out for me. It’s actually fairly well acted; Mark Wahlberg is surprisingly credible as the sort of good-bad guy he’s playing, one we’re kept rooting for even though he’s a pretty despicable slice of humanity. Rosa Salazar makes a good classic film noir-style femme fatale, and I especially liked Chukwudi Iwuji as the arrogant tech gazillionaire who believes his money and economic power sets him above the common run of everyday humanity, including the rules the rest of us have to live by.