Play Dirty is a 2025 heist action thriller directed and co-written by Shane Black, with Charles Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, released by Amazon MGM Studios on Prime Video. It runs 125 minutes and stars Mark Wahlberg as Parker, with LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Keegan-Michael Key, Chukwudi Iwuji, Nat Wolff, Thomas Jane and Tony Shalhoub. It is adapted from the Parker novels written by Donald E. Westlake under the pen name Richard Stark.

Let me open with the question I could not stop asking while watching. Why is this film two hours and five minutes long? I am not asking that rhetorically. I would genuinely like somebody to write to me and explain the reasoning.

Because this was fun. Genuinely fun. There are a lot of cool, interesting moments in here, exactly the sort of thing a heist film needs to work. Switcheroos, double crosses, people improvising badly and somehow succeeding. Is it great? No. Not by a long way. But I had a good time, and that counts for a lot.

The list of reasons it falls short of great is reasonably long, but two of them stand out.

The first is the computer effects, which become noticeably poor in the back half of the film. And this appears to be a shared observation rather than me being fussy, because one reviewer tied it directly to who financed the thing. Their argument was that Shane Black used to have genuine film studios behind his work and now has a technology company, and that the difference is visible on screen. They described the effects as artificial and gloopy, which is about as accurate as criticism gets.

The second, and the bigger one for me, is the runtime. This film does not need to be anywhere near this long. You could remove thirty minutes without touching anything that matters, and the result would be just as enjoyable and arguably a good deal better.

And once again, I find myself in reasonable company. The Hollywood Reporter’s review referred flatly to its bloated two hour runtime, noting that Black keeps his foot on the accelerator throughout in the hope the audience will not notice how haphazard the plotting is. Another critic put it more harshly, writing that the film is not just bad but bad and overlong, and then adding the observation that genuinely struck me, which is that despite the length it still manages to feel as though whole chunks are missing.

Mark Wahlberg did great, as he always does in this style of film. He is extremely comfortable in this particular lane and he knows exactly what he is doing in it.