Play Dirty - Triple Game, review: Mark Wahlberg is not a worthy replacement for Robert Downey Jr.

Parker is back, and he's once again the most ruthless and detached robber in all of New York and the East Coast of the United States. The hard-boiled criminal conceived by American writer Donald E. Westlake, already brought to the big screen countless times, is a kind of blank canvas on which very different directors have painted over the years. Among others in this heterogeneous group, Godard, Boorman, Flynn, and Statham are worth mentioning, as they have contributed to building his cinematic myth.

Parker's return to cinema with a new incarnation

The character – a ruthless thief with no emotional involvement, focused only on his “art,” which is the meticulous planning and execution of very ambitious robberies – seems to have the sole characteristic of being tough, never swayed by sentiment(alism), tougher than the hard-boiled genre itself to which his novels belong. Parker is the kind of person who coldly kills a man on camera without even that exit, that unforeseen event, that line that makes the execution cinematically appealing or at least motivated. If it serves the plan, nothing will stop him. 

The protagonist of over twenty lean and unadorned novels written under a pseudonym by Westlake, Parker is the ideal character to expand the Prime Video catalog. A paid streaming service that in recent times seems to be increasingly pushing towards an offering tailored to a male audience whose age even allows them to remember some previous incarnations of the character. Here, Parker is played by Mark Wahlberg, who, with his infamous monotone expression, his Bostonian accent, and his intensely monotonous acting, would theoretically be the perfect interpreter for this role.

Play Dirty is Shane Black's very subdued return

Except that Play Dirty - Triple Game is also and above all a film written and directed by Shane Black, the director of cult classics with a strong comedic vein like The Nice Guys, Iron Man 3, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, as well as the author of the famous Lethal Weapon screenplay. It is the very fact of being Black's new film that distinguishes Play Dirty - Triple Game from the mass of direct-to-streaming action releases that flood the main platforms every week. It is Black's presence that put the film on the radar of cinephiles and genre lovers, who, however, will probably face disappointment, given that Black's natural talent for screenwriting and directing is largely unutilized here. And to think that, given the names involved, it seemed to be one of those cases where the film's lack of theatrical distribution suggested an old direct-to-video nature, a category of films that then as now don't go through theaters because the bare minimum was invested in them in the hope of still catching a home audience. Once it was VHS, today it's weekly platform releases. 

In Play Dirty - Triple Game, Shane Black does not specifically adapt a Westlake novel, but condenses the characteristics of the entire Parker literary cycle, writing an original story that serves as a compendium of the literary saga comprising over twenty volumes. Furthermore, by using a snowy New York setting conceptually close to Christmas, the screenplay returns to Black's never-dormant obsession with setting his stories during the holidays, from Lethal Weapon to Iron Man 3. 

The script, at least on the surface, is pure Black: an initial robbery that ends well despite some hitches, but whose team members are gunned down by a new recruit, a girl named Zen (Rosa Salazar).

In tracking her down to avenge the death of his team, the unflappable Parker becomes involved in the theft of the remains and treasure of a Spanish galleon also targeted by the Outfit, the criminal organization led by Tony Shalhoub, who is Parker's nemesis and who exiled him from New York some years prior. Can one man dismantle a powerful criminal organization for what he perceives as an affront to his freedom? Predictably, many plot twists and narrative reversals follow, as well as many action sequences (especially car, motorcycle, and train chases) that aim to be spectacular, but whose ambition is stifled by the massive use of very crude CGI.

Mark Wahlberg is not the best replacement for Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Parker

The main problem with the film, which never quite works, lies primarily with its protagonist. Mark Wahlberg, in fact, took over from Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Parker after the latter (a long-time friend and collaborator of Shane's) had to pull out of the project as an actor at the last minute, remaining in the role of producer. Mark Wahlberg, in theory, is the perfect man to play a character who, not ironically, ruthlessly kills anyone who tells him “where he can walk and where he can't.” The point of the film is to show him in his extreme detachment and his dependence on his work as a robber, transforming the character's rigidity into comedic verve.

The problem with Mark Wahlberg is that he can only play these roles when they are taken seriously and not as here, where there is an evident and even self-deprecating comedic undertone that should make the character amusing in his rigidity. Not that Black ever truly approaches the peaks of his best writing in a script with many passages written almost automatically, introduced by very stereotypical characters, starting with the classic villain who explains his plan in detail, summarizing what happened for the viewer he considers very distracted and then allowing him to dive headfirst into the next action scene, without further elaboration.