Exclusive: <em>Play Dirty</em> Will Bring Back 'Gut-Punch, Old-School Storytelling'

To ask Shane Black about his bookshelf is to get a crash course on pulp fiction from a connoisseur. During a Zoom call, I ask Black about the library of paperbacks behind him in his office. Soon, he's naming title after title in the stack. "We have Death is a Round Black Ball by Mike Roscoe," he says, showing off the glossy cover. He flashes The Long Green by Bart Spicer and recites the cover's tagline. "Carney Wilde tangles with a crime worse than murder. I don't even know what the crime is, because I haven't opened it. But I will stop every once in a while and take down an old detective novel and read it."

Though Shane Black has made fantastical franchise movies, like Iron Man 3 (2013) and The Predator (2018), he is at home in the grounded worlds of crime comedies. He launched a franchise with his screenplay for Lethal Weapon in 1987. And his other films, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005), and The Nice Guys (2016), have become cult classics that exemplify his taste for hard-boiled noir, quick-witted humor, and the sentimentality of Christmas. So it should surprise no one what he has cooking up next.

After a long seven-year absence from directing, Black returns for Play Dirty, a new movie adaptation of the Parker series by crime author Donald E. Westlake and co-written with his The Nice Guy collaborators Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi. In Play Dirty, Mark Wahlberg stars as a professional thief whose charge of a heist puts him at odds against a dictator, the mafia, and the world's richest man all at once. Play Dirty also stars Rosa Salazar, LaKeith Stanfield, Dermont Mulroney, Tony Shalhoub, Keegan-Michael Key, Nat Wolff, and Chukwudi Iwuji, making it quite the star-studded heist film.

Play Dirty will stream on Prime Video starting October 1. Esquire has the exclusive first look at the trailer, which you can watch below.

After The Predator in 2018, Black says he sought to "work on some of my own stuff" and "go away from IP." He tells me, "I started to work on personal projects, things that were smaller." Still, Black harbored a dream project of sorts: An adaptation of Westlake's Parker book series. In 2021, Black seized on the chance to make that dream a reality when producer Joel Silver called and asked him what he'd like to do. "If you could get the rights to Parker, that'd be great," Black told him.

He didn't have high hopes, however. The rights to Westlake's series—some 28 books in total—were scattered all over Hollywood, with several movie adaptations already said and done. (The most recent being Parker, starring Jason Statham and released in 2013.) But the books still meant a lot to Black, who remembers discovering them at 17 years old whilst thumbing through "the spinner rack in a tiny little drugstore" in La Habra, California. He sings in praise of Donald Westlake, as the mystery writer "other mystery writers would turn to."

Initially a fan of Westlake's comical Dortmunder novels, Black was eventually drawn to the grittier Parker. "The Parker books had a rough, down-and-dirty feel," Black says. "They paint the life of a professional thief in uncompromising terms. He's an anti-hero. He's a criminal. He's a pragmatist. He's a planner. That appealed to me. When you finish them, you feel like you've been ensconced within a type of old-school storytelling."

Mark Wahlberg stars in Play Dirty as Parker, a professional thief and the main character of the Parker book series by Donald E. Westlake.

Rosa Salazar co-stars in Play Dirty as Zen, another thief who gets Parker caught up in a new heist.

Eventually, Joel Silver came back with the good news: They had the rights to the Parker books. All of them. "Joel had gotten us a chance to do the entire thing. We were able to pluck from different books." This is why Play Dirty isn't just another movie based on the first Parker book, The Hunter, published in 1962 and already adapted to celluloid twice. Play Dirty tells its own story that "takes place after the events of the first book," says Black.

While other movies based on the Parker books retained the grittiness Black so loved, the director sought to inject levity back into the genre. "There have been a lot of crime movies, and they're just unrelentingly grim," he says. "There's so much of people descending in black, [hanging] upside down, wearing laser goggles and looking through matrices of green light. We don't want to do that. We want to do this gut-punch, old-school kind of storytelling."

LaKeith Stanfield co-stars as Grofield, which Shane black describes as a "sidekick" that LaKeith brings to life with "a wonderful performance."

"I’m excited for audiences to get the kind of film you don’t see much of," says writer/director Shane Black. "It’s an anti-hero piece. It’s old school in its sensibility, but it has a brisk feel and a modern pace."

Which brings Black to his favorite time of the year: Christmas. Most, if not all of Black's movies take place during the holidays, and Play Dirty is no different. Black was initially resistant to include his favorite motif again, but something about Play Dirty practically begged for it.

"I was keen not to keep it up, because once people start noticing and commenting on it, it becomes not as fun anymore. It's just expected. In [Play Dirty] though, I had this notion of shooting in the winter in New York City. I've always wanted to do that. There's something magical and engaging [about] New York in the snow, especially as a juxtaposition to the harshness of the Parker story. I could have set it in January, but why not just do Christmas in New York?"

Amusingly, Play Dirty was shot in Australia during the heat of summer. Even so, Black has still seen his Christmas wish come true.