Play Dirty (2025) - Shane Black Biggest Misfire Yet - REVIEW

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Play Dirty (2025) is one of those movies where you sit down expecting something decent because Shane Black is behind the camera, the guy who directed The Nice Guys which was incredible, and then you get whatever the hell Play Dirty ended up being. Mark Wahlberg plays Parker, this professional thief character that's based on those Donald Westlake novels that have been adapted quite a few times but the problem here is Wahlberg looks like he would rather be anywhere else on planet Earth than on this set. Zero energy, zero charm, just this blank stare going through every single scene like he was reading off cue cards for a commercial he doesnt even want to do. The setup actually sounds pretty cool with Parker and his crew pull off a job at the beginning and then Rosa Salazar who plays this new member named Zen just murders everybody except him, takes all the money and disappear, in some way reminds me about "The Italian Job", then she comes back later with this even bigger job involving some sunken treasure off the coast of some made up South American country and they gotta rob it before the corrupt president gets his hands on it. Sounds exciting except the execution is so damn boring and lifeless that you stop caring about 20 minutes in, the effects look cheap as hell too, everything has this weird fake quality to it like an old video game cut scene, that opening sequence at the racetrack where horses are jumping over cars should be this big wow moment but it just looks bad and weightless and fake.

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18392014/
• Platform: PRIME VIDEO

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The cast is stacked with people like LaKeith Stanfield, Keegan Michael Key, Tony Shalhoub, Thomas Jane, all these talented people who deserve way better material than this, Stanfield plays this actor guy who runs a failing theater and he is always trying to like method act his way through the heist which could of been funny but they dont do enough with it, Keegan Michael Key is basically wasted here, Tony Shalhoub shows up as the villain and he was doing this weird thing where he was supposed to be intimidating but it never lands, Thomas Jane gets killed off so early that you wonder why they even bothered casting him. The whole buddy movie vibe that Shane Black usually nails is missing here, in my opinion the movie story splinter into so many characters and it wanted to develop each one of them that ends doing nothing, here there was too many damn characters and none of them get enough screen time to become memorable or interesting, they try to do something with Wahlberg and Stanfield but it doesnt work because Stanfield feels like a side character not a co lead. The script feels like it was written by committee, three people worked on this thing and somehow it still came out feeling flat and generic, theres double crosses and triple crosses and you see all of them coming from a mile away, nothing is surprising, nothing makes you lean forward in your seat, its just paint by numbers heist movie garbage that could have been made by anybody.

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I honestly dont understand what happen with Shane Black here, the same guy who wrote Lethal Weapon, the guy who understands action and dialogue and character better than most people working today but this feels like he had zero control over the final product or maybe he just stopped caring, latter after looking up the budget for this movie I find out that Robert Downey Jr was originally supposed to play Parker and hes one of the producers on this, he backed out and I think he probably read the script and knew this wasn't going to work, Downey has that charisma that can elevate weak material, same with Ryan Gosling, those guys can take a character off the page and make it something special through sheer force of personality, Wahlberg cant do that, he is good when hes doing comedy like The Other Guys with Will Ferrell or the Ted movies where he playing off someone funnier than him but when hes trying to be the serious tough guy with no sense of humor he just comes off as dull, its almost like he was born to stay funny and young, because age on his character is another problem for him. His performance here is the same from start to finish, no growth, no journey, just Mark Wahlberg doing his Mark Wahlberg thing and expecting that to be enough, his character has no personality or charm beyond being good at stealing stuff and wanting revenge, you dont root for him, you dont care if he succeeds or fails, he is just there taking up space while the movie drags on for over two hours.

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The heist itself isnt even clever or interesting, they are trying to steal this treasure from a sunken ship called the Lady of Arintero if I didnt get the name wrong, its full of jewels and artifacts worth hundreds of millions, there was this whole thing about a corrupt president and Tony Shalhoubs character Lozeni whos running this crime organization in New York and everyone after the same prize, they plan to rob a train thats transporting the treasure but then somebody is a step ahead of them and it all goes sideways. Theres a scene where they derail the train and Stanfield barely avoids getting hit by it, like the train passes inches from his face and somehow hes totally fine, not a scratch on him, the laws of physics dont apply in this movie apparently. The third part of the movie just becomes this mess of people shooting at each other and jewels getting scattered everywhere and revelations that dont mean anything because you never cared about these people in the first place, Zen turns out to be playing everybody for her own reasons, she wants to help her country, Parker kills her because she murdered his original crew and he promised this widow played by Gretchen Mol that he would get revenge, he hands out jewels to people like he is Oprah, but specifically gives his share to the families of his fallen crew members, which actually carries weight given his promise to Grace and his code of honor. At the end its just Parker returning to his simple life of crime alongside Grofield after distributing the jewels and killing Zen, a kind of life reset ending.

This could have been something special, Shane Black had all the pieces, a talented cast, a big budget from Amazon, source material thats been adapted successfully before but instead we get this generic streaming flop that feels like it was made to be fill content quota, nobody involved seems to care, the action is forgettable, the characters are empty, the plot is predictable, the dialogue lacks that Shane Black spark, its Christmas themed because of course it is, Black always does Christmas but even that feels half assed here, its just another streaming movie that you will forget about after watching. I would call this is Shane Black on autopilot making a Red Notice type movie, just bland corporate product with no soul, I know I rant a bit on this one but had to, Wahlberg is miscast, the supporting players are wasted, its a mess from top to bottom and I cant recommend it to anyone. Maybe a 6 out of 10 if Im being generous and thats only because Rosa Salazar looks both bad ass and damn hot, there is also Stanfield who has a few decent line, everything else about this movie is a waste of time and talent, I would say skip it.

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