{"id":193343,"date":"2025-10-06T15:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T15:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/193343\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T15:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T15:43:08","slug":"play-dirty-could-have-been-the-movie-to-end-the-mark-wahlberg-rut-but-it-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/193343\/","title":{"rendered":"Play Dirty could have been the movie to end the Mark Wahlberg rut \u2013 but it isn\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"

At one point the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Shane Black has always had a knack for characters. Specifically, for writing winningly funny action heroes \u2013 sassy, endearing roles that draw fresh and unexpected work from familiar actors. He did it with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon (1987). He did it with a freshly sober Robert Downey Jr in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), a film that led directly to Downey\u2019s reinvention as an A-list blockbuster phenomenon. And he did it with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in 2016\u2019s The Nice Guys, an underseen buddy-noir movie<\/a> with a zealous fanbase. Now, it\u2019s Mark Wahlberg\u2019s turn to get the Shane Black treatment. With Play Dirty, Wahlberg has been given, for the first time in years, a role worth sinking his teeth into. But I\u2019m not sure he manages much more than a nibble.<\/p>\n

Play Dirty is Black\u2019s fifth self-directed feature, and the first since 2018\u2019s errant action-horror misstep The Predator<\/a>. A mean-spirited heist thriller with a preposterous body count and a belligerent levity about it, the film sees Wahlberg play the mononymous super-thief known as \u201cParker\u201d. It\u2019s a character pulled from novels by Donald E Westlake, and one that has been brought to screen a handful of times before (played by actors including Lee Marvin, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson and Jason Statham). Never has the character been rendered with so much pep, so much emphasis on comedy. It\u2019s a biting shame, then, that Wahlberg fails to rise to the occasion.<\/p>\n

To be fair to Wahlberg, the character \u2013 a sort of unkillable man-myth with a propensity for cartoonish violence \u2013 is largely left to play the straight man, as louder and wackier side-characters steal focus. (Among them: LaKeith Stanfield\u2019s code-switching thespian-criminal Grofield and a duplicitous ex-militia member played by Rosa Salazar.) The material also creates its own problems: Play Dirty falls far shy of Black\u2019s best work, with the genuinely funny and inventively kinetic moments undercut by a tonal inconsistency, and some shlocky, seedy impulses. But Wahlberg\u2019s perfunctory performance must shoulder some of the blame \u2013 a charisma vacuum at the movie\u2019s very heart.<\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/p>\n

Mark Wahlberg in ‘Play Dirty’ (Amazon)<\/p>\n

Play Dirty is unlikely to be Wahlberg\u2019s final chance at a late-career resurgence. (Even if he had been brilliant in it, the fact that the film eschewed a cinema release to launch directly on Prime Video meant it was always going to slip under the radar to some extent.) But if you look at the last several years of Wahlberg\u2019s career, it\u2019s obvious that this was a missed opportunity. He has continued to work prolifically, but with little discernment in what he signs on to; his Oscar-nominated turn in The Departed (2006) seems like a lifetime ago.<\/p>\n

Artistically speaking, Wahlberg\u2019s best role came near the very start of his acting career, when he played turbulent porn star Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s propulsive changing-of-the-times classic Boogie Nights (1997). In subsequent years, he enjoyed a period as both an in-demand leading man and a well-considered supporting player, fronting blockbusters such as Planet of the Apes (2001), The Italian Job (2003) and The Happening (2007), earning acclaim for performances in The Departed (2006) and The Fighter (2010). Over the following decade, he increasingly turned towards lower-brow comedies (2012\u2019s Ted; 2015\u2019s Daddy\u2019s Home), also finding a short-lived niche in robust, earnest thrillers about public service (Deepwater Horizon; Patriots Day).<\/p>\n

Over the past nine years or so, his efforts have brought ever-diminishing returns. It may be that audiences have grown tired of him, or that he\u2019s simply aged out of the sort of roles he once hoovered up. His biggest recent hit was the video-game adaptation Uncharted, which cast him as a swaggering sea captain opposite Tom Holland. The film was a financial success, but received middling reviews, with Wahlberg garnering few compliments. Elsewhere, it\u2019s been films such as Arthur the King, The Union, and Flight Risk. He\u2019s not yet descended into straight-to-video purgatory, but glamorous work this is not.<\/p>\n

Also significant has been the growing awareness among younger moviegoers, in the era of online information-sharing, of the violent racist hate crimes<\/a> Wahlberg committed as a teenager. There\u2019s a sense that no one knows quite how to feel about it: people\u2018s careers have been completely derailed for far lesser offences, but Wahlberg\u2019s historical hate crimes were a matter of public record back when he was becoming a popular Hollywood star. If the court of public opinion opted to accept his contrition and forgive him at the time \u2013 as was, essentially, what happened \u2013 then it cannot simply about-face and relitigate the matter now. But his deeply problematic past can\u2019t be overlooked, either.<\/p>\n

\"Wahlberg<\/p>\n

Wahlberg and Stanfield in \u2018Play Dirty\u2019 (Prime Video)<\/p>\n

The world doesn\u2019t need a Mark Wahlberg resurgence. (A Marknaissance? A Comeberg?) Even in his pomp, Wahlberg was never a generational actor. But he had his charms, a certain cocksure macho stolidness that, when deployed well on screen, made him more of a draw than a turn-off. Play Dirty is an admirable attempt to inject some much-needed fun into Wahlberg\u2019s more recent persona. It just never manages to find a vein.<\/p>\n

\u2018Play Dirty\u2019 is streaming on Prime Video now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At one point the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, Shane Black has always had a knack for characters. Specifically,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,96308,96311,337,96310,8555,96309],"class_list":{"0":"post-193343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-mark-wahlberg","12":"tag-mel-gibson","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-play-dirty","15":"tag-robert-downey-jr","16":"tag-shane-black"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}