Play Dirty could have been movie to end Wahlberg rut

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 — 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 directly led to Downey’s reinvention as an A-list blockbuster phenomenon. And he did it with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in 2016’s The Nice Guys, an underseen buddy-noir movie with a zealous fanbase. Now, it’s Mark Wahlberg’s 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’m not sure he manages much more than a nibble.

Play Dirty is Black’s fifth self-directed feature, and the first since 2018’s errant action-horror misstep The Predator. 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 “Parker”. It’s 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’s a biting shame, then, that Wahlberg fails to rise to the occasion. To be fair to Wahlberg, the character — a sort of unkillable man-myth with a propensity for cartoonish violence — is largely left to play the straight man, as louder and wackier side characters steal focus. (Among them: LaKeith Stanfield’s 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’s best work, with the genuinely funny and inventively kinetic moments undercut by a tonal inconsistency, and some shlocky, seedy impulses. But Wahlberg’s perfunctory performance must shoulder some of the blame — a charisma vacuum at the movie’s very heart.

Play Dirty is unlikely to be Wahlberg’s 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’s career, it’s obvious that this was a missed opportunity. He has continued to work prolifically, but with little discernment in what he signs onto; his Oscar-nominated turn in The Departed (2006) seems like a lifetime ago.

Artistically speaking, Wahlberg’s best role came near the very start of his acting career, playing turbulent porn star Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s propulsive changing-of-the-times classic Boogie Nights (1997). Since then, he enjoyed a period as both an in-demand leading man and 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’s Ted; 2015’s Daddy’s Home), also finding a short-lived niche in robust, earnest thrillers about public service (Deepwater Horizon; Patriots Day).

Over the last nine years or so, he has continued to work prolifically, but with ever-diminishing returns. It may be that audiences grew tired of him, or that he had 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’s been films such as Arthur the King, The Union, and Flight Risk. He’s not yet descended into straight-to-video purgatory, but glamorous work this is not.

Also significant has been the growing public awareness among younger moviegoers, in the era of online information-sharing, of the violent racist hate crimes Wahlberg committed as a teenager. There’s a sense that no one knows quite how to feel about it: people now have their careers completely derailed for far lesser offences, but Wahlberg’s 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 — as was, essentially, what happened — then they cannot simply about-face and relitigate the matter now. But his deeply problematic past can’t be overlooked either.

The world doesn’t 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’s more recent persona. It just never manages to find a vein.