PLAY DIRTY (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Play Dirty, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 1, 2025

Before Play Dirty, the professional thief Parker has been portrayed by six different actors across as many movies. They've been so spread out over the decades that only fans of author Donald E. Westlake's character (the main one in a series of 24 books written under the penname Richard Stark) may have really noticed, and with that many actors in a string of unconnected movies over nearly 60 years, it would be tough for moviegoers to notice, let alone get a solid gauge on the character.

This is to say that the guy, played by Mark Wahlberg this time around, is starting to feel slightly more familiar with this seventh movie adaptation of the books. Co-writer/director Shane Black even gives Parker an animated opening credit sequence with dramatic music that's more than a bit reminiscent of something from a James Bond movie. Black seems to want us to have a sense that the Parker of his movie is in that same vein. We might not know the specifics of his assorted exploits and capers, but just like the famous British spy, we don't have to in order to understand who the character is, what he does, and why he has been around as long as he has been on the page and in movies.

That approach essentially works for Parker in this movie, which frames him as the both the most calculating and coldest person in any room in which he finds himself. The way Wahlberg plays him is slightly intriguing, too, because we don't get a sense that his Parker is necessarily the smartest guy in that room. He is, however, the only one to see a situation from an angle that everybody else would dismiss as too ridiculous or cruel to entertain—if they even recognize it at all.

Parker has a bit of back story he offers at one point, explaining how he realized he wanted to be a thief when he was just 8 years old. He stole some booze from a store, but the stealing itself wasn't the thrill. It was an elaborate plan to get a bigger kid to stop bullying him, involving the destruction of an innocent girl's bicycle and the bully's alcoholic father, that excited him. Once we comprehend that the man is an amoral actor simply doing whatever it takes to get what he wants at any given moment, the whole thing clicks into place.

Black, then, is certainly a fine choice to oversee this new iteration of Parker, because he has a long line of movies featuring characters who are flawed, problematic, downright misanthropic, or some combination of those and similar traits. The screenplay, co-written with Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, doesn't try to soften the edges of that character, which is somewhat refreshing, even as the actual plot of this tale is so ridiculous and convoluted that Parker ends up playing a secondary role to it.

That plot involves a sunken treasure, discovered off the coast of an unspecified fictional country where a dictator plans to use the lost riches to make himself inordinately wealthy. All of this is eventually revealed after an introductory heist ends with Zen (Rosa Salazar) betraying the crew and killing everyone except Parker.

He swears revenge, but once he learns that hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of artifacts on the line, Parker's not above working with Zen, her team, and some of his own colleagues to steal the treasure before the dictator can stage a robbery so no one knows the riches are going to him. There's also the hitch that, from a past robbery, Parker is persona non grata in New York City. A local crime organization called the Outfit, run by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), is both in charge of stealing those treasures for the dictator and out to exact their own vengeance on Parker for breaking their deal.

To attempt to see the resulting heist, which requires precise timing and assorted distractions/deflections (a few of which aren't even revealed until after they happen) and a degree of chaos that would be wholly unpredictable, as realistic is an impossible feat. Black and the other screenwriters seem to recognize this, at least.

The centerpiece sequence of the movie has Parker and his team—also consisting of struggling actor Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), married thieves Ed (Keegan-Michael Key) and Brenda (Claire Lovering), and dimwitted driver Stan (Chai Hansen)—watches as they try to pull off the already-improbable while also drunk or hungover from a night of premature partying. The sequence is an extravagantly orchestrated comedy of errors, and its assorted moving parts and humor are almost enough to keep us from thinking too much about how many innocent people must be seriously injured or killed in the final bit of havoc.

Parker wouldn't and doesn't care, of course, because his mind is only on the goal at the hand, but in discussing the plotting and practical mechanics of Play Dirty, it should be clear that who Parker is throughout all of this isn't anywhere near as important to the filmmakers as what he has to do. He's the right man for this job, since it exists around various betrayals and characters putting their own wants or needs over anything else, but the job itself is so complicated that it might not be the right one to get a sense of the man.

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