The man with the getting-his face: Shane Black and the sellout of Play Dirty

Play Dirty is bad. It’s obviously bad as a piece of craft, sloppily constructed and poorly acted and actively unpleasant to look at. To understand how bad it is on a deeper level, as an adaptation of art, you need to know a bit about Shane Black. But you really need to know about Parker.

Parker is the main character of Play Dirty, and more to the point he is the subject of a series of two dozen books written by Donald Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark (16 in the 1960s and early 70s, the final eight between the late 90s and Westlake’s death in 2008). He does not have a first name, he does has a profession: thief. The Parker books are about him planning heists, executing heists and dealing with the fallout of heists. Various other characters recur throughout the books, from fellow heisters to the occasional antagonist, but most people who bother Parker do not make it to a second novel. He kills people in nearly every book, although these people are almost always in the same business as he is or are amateurs trying to horn in. Parker is in many ways a sociopath who follows and understands society’s rules only to most effectively circumvent them and the people who abide by them. He is one of the great literary creations of the past 100 years (and Stark is one of the great writers — I’ve written more extensively about their work in the past).

And he has been the subject of many movies, starting with John Boorman’s pop noir dreamscape Point Blank and running through Taylor Hackford’s hacky horseshit Parker. The books offer two major hooks for adaptation. One is their plots — Stark maps out heists with precise detail and zero fat and writes crime with a merciless eye for character weakness and how actions reverberate, the filmed possibilities are obvious. And the other is their atmosphere — one of the best and longest-running websites about the series is called “The Violent World Of Parker” and that cuts to the guts of the matter, that Parker’s existence is harsh and he is at home there. In some ways Parker’s most direct ancestor is the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett’s great protagonist (who is not exactly a hero) — a guy without a name who burns through criminal underworlds with no frills and plenty of violence, just as a private eye instead of a crook. But like Parker, the Op is above all a professional, a man who does his work and does it well, and does it consistently. So much crime fiction, especially in films, takes the professional crook as a subject but only shows his final act, the part where he doesn’t get away. The life is implied — Jean-Pierre Melville perhaps comes closest to this in his detail and above all attitude, Lino Ventura is the great uncast cinematic Parker — but it is not shown the way Stark’s books show it over and over again as Parker may not come away with the money but always survives for the next job.

Adaptation does not mean fidelity, especially when moving from one medium to another. Point Blank is a canonized classic; as an adaptation of The Hunter (the first Parker novel) it is pretty unfaithful, keeping story beats while shifting the tone drastically. Payback adapts the same novel and its tale of revenge and reclamation — a partner betrays Parker and leaves him for dead in order to pay off a debt to the mob; when the mob refuses to return Parker’s money he takes it back the hard way — but while writer/director Brian Helgeland does a great job keeping the novel’s meanness in his director’s cut, star Mel Gibson conspired with the suits to take over the production and create a more mainstream, sympathetic portrayal. The Split, an adaptation of The Seventh, greatly reduces the complex character dynamics of the book, which largely focuses on the fallout of a heist — but it also recognizes that heisting rules on the screen and a robbery that takes a few pages in the book becomes the centerpiece of the movie, which is highly enjoyable on its own terms. The aforementioned Parker is a turd and a waste of Jason Statham, but a few years later Statham starred in Wrath Of Man, which is not an adaptation of any Parker book yet feels hugely inspired by the novels’ four-part point-of-view-shifting structure and their overall coldness and unstoppable ruthlessness — it’s a spiritual adaptation that is better than several straight ones. But there has never been a truly straight adaptation.

***

Part of this is on Westlake. He sold the rights to adapt the books, but refused to license the Parker name unless he could get a series, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In USA, an uncompensated adaptation of The Jugger, had Westlake even more sensitive to rights issues (Hackford’s film was made after Westlake’s death, when his estate was not as picky). So Parker’s stories would instead feature people by the name of Walker, Porter, McLain, the patently goofy Earl Macklin (who is the protagonist of John Flynn’s The Outfit, which adapts the book of the same name and is probably the adaptation that hits both tone and plot with equal consideration). This is not a major change, and yet it stands in for all of the ways the adaptations ignore or are unable to grasp the essential nature of Parker himself.

Stark writes in an omniscient third person that allows him to show the reader other characters’ thoughts, but he largely follows what is going on in Parker’s head. And what is going on in Parker’s head is rarely shared with others when it does not need to be. Parker speaks tersely and acts without hesitation, why he does this is besides the point for the people being spoken to or acted upon unless Parker decides otherwise. It is up to Stark, whose authorial voice is not entirely that of his character but who clearly is of a similar philosophy, to let the reader in on what drives Parker. In The Man With The Getaway Face, the second book in the series, Parker has to deal with a plan brought forward by Alma, a dumb amateur who is planning to betray the gang; he susses this out immediately and offers mild pushback to her scheme so he can then acquiesce and keep her in the dark:  

It didn’t matter which way they went, or how many people saw them go. Parker knew that but he didn’t say anything about it. This Alma was a busher, a new fish, she didn’t know how this kind of operation was handled. Parker knew this, because this was his line of work, but he didn’t say anything about it…. If he let her keep her original plan he could be sure of getting the money back. If he forced her to change by making the grab more sensible, then maybe he wouldn’t be able to figure out her cross in time. He’d had to argue so she wouldn’t get suspicious.

This is great crime fiction, it is also entirely dependent on authorial insight. A filmed version of this scene could potentially indicate Parker’s insincerity in his questions but would still need to make it clear why he’s doing this. Voiceover would work, or perhaps a later aside to a trusted partner, but this would waste time on explanation. Parker is an interior character and one who denies sympathy or “relatability,” he does not have exterior hooks like another person he’s trying to help or a noble cause to steal for. Without being able to see inside his head he is a cold black box, and it is unsurprising that mainstream filmmakers are wary of putting this person at the center of their films.

So they find vulnerabilities, humanizing relationships. “Earl Macklin” is avenging a brother, in Payback “Porter” has a relationship with an old flame (this is ridiculous drivel in the version Gibson made after stealing the film from Helgeland; Helgeland’s actual cut is far better yet still feels the need to add this character to the story, which is another adaptation of The Hunter). So the name change also acts as a signal of sorts, setting up the larger undercutting of character that will come over the course of the movie and in some ways cushioning it. But what if someone kept the name, someone with more crime fiction cred than Taylor Hackford? That would seem to indicate a more faithful depiction of the character, right?

I thought Shane Black was a terrible choice to adapt a Parker movie three years ago and I will not beat around the bush — every fear I had was proven true. Black’s great crime fiction influence is not Hammett but the wounded, witty and pickled Raymond Chandler; he writes stories about people furious at an unjust world and who might not win in their fight against it but will draw blood and joke about it along the way. Black is the poet laureate of the buddy action comedy, he thrives with two people giving each other shit as they kick some ass. He is the wrong person to write a cold amoral loner, unless it was in some kind of Dogme 95-esque challenge to his sensibilities. And that would be fascinating to see, although unlikely to be bankrolled by Amazon. Still, I also thought Black had one thing in common with Parker: being a professional.

***

At the start of Play Dirty, a man tries to jack the racetrack heist Parker and his gang have just pulled off and Parker cold-bloodedly kills him in front of his wife and children before giving the wife $10,000 from the take anyway. One member of the gang later scoffs at this apparent sympathy, but grizzled crook Thomas Jane sets them straight — by giving her the money, Parker is making her complicit and buying her silence when the police come knocking. It’s a nifty way to handle the dynamic discussed above, how to elucidate action that makes ruthless sense from Parker’s unspoken perspective. Action film expert (and Parker fan) Outlaw Vern approvingly noted this in his review, but he immediately puts his finger on how Black rarely stays this course: “If he thinks of a funny thing for Parker to say, or a thing he can do that violates his stated code but gets a chuckle, he doesn’t have the discipline not to use it.” And that gets to the core of things. Black’s movies can be shaggy and vulgar and bite off more than they can chew, but Play Dirty is undisciplined. Unprofessional.

Black and co-writers Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi credit the movie’s story as “Based on the ‘Parker’ series by Richard Stark,” and yet they take neither plot nor atmosphere. The film’s heists are made up out of whole cloth and the larger narrative of Parker being betrayed but roped into his betrayer’s scheme to steal treasure from the New York City mob to liberate a conveniently unnamed Global South country is also nowhere to be found in his novels (although it has small similarities with the plot of The Damsel, one of four Stark novels about Parker’s fellow heister and sometime thespian Alan Grofield). Parker will occasionally work big — stealing the payroll of a mining town, robbing an island casino, essentially destroying the mob rule of an entire city in Butcher’s Moon, Stark’s homage to/reworking of Red Harvest — but these heists are meticulously planned and based in observation and organization. And ignored in Play Dirty for slapdash explosive nonsense executed via the most wretched CGI I’ve ever seen in a mainstream motion picture. Vehicles hit bodies and launch them into the air with gravity-ignoring goofiness that all but sounds its own “boi-oi-oing,” and that weightlessness extends to every instance of heavy machinery — trains, trucks, bombs — allegedly causing carnage. Black can’t find the energy to create Bayhem or the patience to actually film a heist, and instead shoots a bunch of actors yelling “whoa!” in front of green screens. Melville’s Un Flic memorably uses exterior shots of a model train to stand in for a real one during that film’s centerpiece heist, and if the fakeness is obvious it still has a tactility and attention to detail mirrored in head crook Richard Crenna taking a crucial moment to calmly smooth his fake mustache before kicking off the robbery. These are the kinds of moments the Parker books are full of, yet Black ignores them.

But he does have those names! Not just Parker’s, but a whole slew of characters from the books appear here, in particular the aforementioned Grofield, who is a frequent partner of Parker’s and the closest thing Parker has to a friend — in the novels Parker goes out of his way to help Grofield out once or twice, although he also leaves him for dead on occasion. It’s not surprising Black would make use of him to access that buddy actioner mode, or that he would use recurring book mob boss Lozini as an antagonist, but he also pulls in other Parker confederates like Philly Webb, Ed and Brenda Mackey, and Stan Devers. Characters who have been finely sketched in the books, so using their names brings connotations and expectations independent of an adaptation’s changes. For some reason Black uses Lozini to replace a pre-existing NYC mobster character from the books, but the character remains an arrogant tyrant losing his grip.

But he is an outlier. LaKeith Stanfield does what he can with Grofield but is all too often reduced to reactions and clowning, as opposed to his inspiration’s wry wit as cover for a crook as ruthless as Parker is. And he is not even the counterbalance of personality that Black usually creates for his protagonists’ partners. (Think Danny Glover’s thwarted by-the-book frustration to Mel Gibson’s reckless mania; Val Kilmer’s fastidious exasperation to Robert Downey Jr.’s seat-of-the-pants attitude; Russell Crowe’s slow-burning brutality to Ryan Gosling’s snark as cover for pain.) This is still preferable to the rank banter and canned quirk that defines the rest of the crew. Chai Hansen’s Devers takes a somewhat callow crook and makes him a doofus; the jovially menacing Ed Mackey is essayed by Keegan-Michael Key, who is as jovial and menacing as a high school English teacher rapping Shakespeare. Mackey’s wife Brenda is the acknowledged brains of their pairing in the books, in the movie Black makes Claire Lovering a boob joke. The three of them get shitfaced the night before the big heist because Black thinks it is funny to throw in a wacky party scene and then have the wacky consequences of hungover people trying to remember how to do a robbery, to wacky ends. What the fuck is this? WHY the fuck is this? There is no joy in watching professionals at work because they have been deprofessionalized, everything Stark put on the table is knocked off, smashed and put back with missing pieces and the gall to pretend it is the same thing. Again, the alleged reason for this movie is discarded for not just Black’s vision, but a lazy and wack version of that vision.

And then there is Parker himself. The core of the movie, a role played by Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Jim Brown, Robert Duval, even Anna Karina after a fashion, and here portrayed by Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg is an interesting actor, the more vulnerable he is allowed to or forced to be the better he gets, but he also plays comic cockiness and exasperation very well. What he is not is stoic or tough, which is unfortunate because that is what Mark Wahlberg thinks he is and what Parker really is, and the chasm between belief and reality makes this far more obnoxious to watch than Wahlberg’s normal self-aggrandizing material. But what makes this not just annoying but offensive is how Black caters to this. How Black writes a scene where Parker intercedes on behalf of a child stealing shit from a newsstand — this is supposed to show a rebellious spirit making a connection, I suppose, when Parker has never given a single solitary shit about a child once in his life*. It’s the kind of maudlin trash that you expect from Wahlberg, puffery and ego massage that shows how a tough hombre looks out for the little guy and it’s embarrassing that Black indulges it. But not as embarrassing as a late-film monologue from Wahlberg about Parker’s past as a bullied child (jesus FUCKING christ) and the revenge he took on his tormenter. It comes after a setback for the gang and is so clearly written as a specific script beat, the rally after the temporary defeat, and listened to in isolation it is something Black uses very well, something he could write almost in his sleep. It doesn’t fit the character at all, but who gives a shit. Not Shane Black. 

Again: Why would you go to such lengths to communicate your communion with source material that you deny at every turn? Why use it in the first place? I will admit I went into this movie with a hateful heart and a bitter soul, but I was vindicated five minutes in. That’s when Black takes a minute to show Wahlberg as Parker taking a breather, washing his face and then looking in the mirror for a few beats in one of those shots that only exists in movies, the “pensive gut check/soul search” pauses that exists as a cheap visual signifier for inner turmoil. This is hack crap to begin with but it is insulting here. Parker has never needed to look at himself and wonder about what he’s done, he knows what he is without a mirror and will do whatever he has to without any second-guessing. (Getaway Face opens with Parker getting plastic surgery to erase his old face, he looks in a mirror for a second solely to confirm the work has been done and immediately moves on with his life.) It’s a fundamental misread of the character that Black of course repeats later in the movie, another mirror and another “meaningful” gaze. And at that point, I started wondering who was actually making this shit.

***

But this is an adaptation, right? These are meant to be fluid! Look at all those other Parker movies, or maybe look to Hammett again. Red Harvest has been straightforwardly adapted, but it (or maybe The Glass Key) traveled halfway around the world to become Yojimbo, the bloody bones of its story transcending time and space. Hammett was an often-brutal writer and The Thin Man has a grim undercurrent of alcoholic despair; the 1934 adaptation was such a fizzy delight that it launched an entire franchise of urbane banter and wholesome relationships. A novel is not the film that it leads to because the filmmakers will make choices about what to build off of and what to leave behind. In the novel of The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade is described as “a blonde Satan,” would anyone trade that fidelity for the choice of Humphrey Bogart in the 1941 film (itself a remake!)?

About midway through Play Dirty, the mob boss Lozini looks out the window at some punks ripping a guy off, and muses on the difference between their street-level violence and the somewhat more discreet version he practices:

“Want to know why they’re dangerous? Because they know they’re criminals. That’s why. We got soft is what it is. We get hit, instead of reaching for a bat, we file a goddamn insurance claim. We forgot we’re criminals. But not those guys down there. And not Parker”.

It’s a nice little monologue, and one condensed and lifted directly from the books (specifically The Outfit). But it makes no sense here. In the book it’s taken from and in the broader world of the novels, it’s tied to the general truce between independent heisters and mob goons that Parker upends in spectacular fashion when they refuse to return money of his they’ve acquired, and the mob’s realization of their vulnerability to these hardcases operating without a structure. Without this context, the speech is an empty signifier — not an adaptation, but an out-of-tune imitation of the real thing. An adaptation can be mercenary or half-hearted or just plain bad — I have not seen the film of the Parker novel Slayground, which apparently takes the can’t-miss plot of “Die Hard in an abandoned amusement park” and proceeds to miss entirely — but it is a person engaging to some degree with the work of another person to make a new work for others to engage with. 

Play Dirty does not engage with the work of Richard Stark as anything but a series of nouns and verbs; and Shane Black does not make a movie that he expects anyone will actually watch. The film resolves with an off-screen killing that is utterly gutless — there’s a hint of Mickey Spillane in the implied action and Spillane was simple and crude but he would damn well show you what went down in all its ugly satisfaction — but it ends with an odd epilogue of Wahlberg and Stanfield walking through New York City, where much of the movie has been set. You see, it turns out that the mob told Wahlberg to leave town at some point and he’s been getting revenge on them this whole time, because “no one tells me where I can walk,” as Wahlberg says. But he also says he doesn’t like New York and that, if nothing else, seem to track with Black himself. Black has visited the East Coast before (most notably in the underrated The Long Kiss Goodnight) but his home is L.A., Marlowe’s town, instead of Parker’s tri-state base of operations. But if Black believes he is a person who won’t take direction, like so many of his protagonists, why is he taking Amazon’s money? Why did he let this film, as dogshit as it is, be sloughed onto their servers after a scant few weeks in theaters? In that review mentioned earlier, Vern is clearly trying to find the bright spots in the movie and correctly notes Jane as one of them, but that leads him down a dark and bitter path:  

“Of course I started picturing what it would be like with him as Parker. But I get it, Jane would not sell as many tickets as Wahlberg so you gotta— wait a minute, they didn’t sell tickets to this anyway, why the fuck do they care? What the fuck is wrong with these billionaires, inventing a fake business model where they dump hundreds of millions into movies that make the same amount whether they’re watched by the entire population of earth or zero people, and then they still insist on making compromises for imaginary commercial considerations? These people have no imagination, no soul, no life.”

More than anything, Play Dirty feels like the result of a prompt to a generative AI: “Write a Richard Stark adaptation in the style of Shane Black.” The names are there, the tropes are there, the result is foul and bogus and unmistakably bad. And the guy who fed that prompt is Shane Black himself. A guy who styles himself a rebel — who’ll take a loss if it means giving the finger to the people who’d tell him where to walk and what to do — becoming not just a hack but a fraud. If you create something with no imagination, no soul, no life, are you any better than a bot? The ending feels like Black himself taking an assessing look in the mirror and trying to joke away the fact he’s sold out in the shittiest, emptiest way possible.

In The Outfit, the mob boss who is the source of that monologue above tries to draw a distinction: “He wasn’t a crook. Bastards like Parker were crooks. He thought of himself as a businessman. All right, he was a criminal, but everybody was more or less dishonest, particularly in business.” It’s an equivocation from a man who no longer knows who he is or how to do his work. And while he doesn’t want to admit it, his time is up. 

*this is in fact played for metafictional laughs in Jimmy The Kid, one of Westlake’s books starring Parker’s comic doppelganger, Dortmunder — Dortmunder and his crew kidnap a child based on a plan that they read in, you guessed it, a Parker novel