Play Dirty (2025)

Shane Black returns to the wisecracking crime picture with a Parker adaptation that assembles a crew, moves the pieces around the board, and mostly trusts banter to carry the load. Mark Wahlberg's thief is terse, the plotting is busy, and the movie settles into the familiar rhythm of a heist that keeps going wrong. The ensemble is noticeably varied, with LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, and Chukwudi Iwuji filling out the crew and the rival ranks, yet the film never pauses to remark on any of it. These are professionals in a genre exercise, and the picture treats them as such.

Where the movie gestures at larger matters, it does so in the standard register of the caper. A corrupt South American president, a syndicate called the Outfit, and a billionaire named Phineas Paul furnish the targets, and there is a faint satisfaction in watching wealthy men get outmaneuvered. Rosa Salazar's death-squad leader has agency and a ruthless competence, and the married thieves Ed and Brenda split the work as equals. None of this amounts to an argument. It is the furniture of a thriller, arranged for momentum.

What the film declines to do is preach. There is no sermonizing about the environment, no messaging about bodies or brains, no tinkering with the historical record, no romance beyond the heterosexual kind. A wisecracking shooter that wants to be liked will rarely stop to lecture, and this one barely slows down. The result is a picture that carries a mild populist glow and little else. It wants to entertain, and on that narrow front it mostly shows up.