Shane Black's Parker film Play Dirty forgot all the Parker

The late Donald E. Westlake published more than two dozen novels under the pseudonym Richard Stark, most of them hardboiled crime stories featuring the criminal antihero Parker. The classic early entries, which rarely exceed 200 pages in length, are lean marvels of economy and style, moving relentlessly forward as they hit the reader with one strikingly unadorned sentence after another. There is usually a heist, a double-cross, and payback, with plotting that typically follows the same addictive four-part formula. In this sense at least, the Parker books are more alike than not, and can even blur together. Yet, in the larger global canon of crime fiction, they remain a singular phenomenon: cool, dark, spare, methodical, free of the distractions of exposition and moral judgment.

Parker himself has always been an enigma, a brutal blank. Though more than four decades separate Westlake’s first Parker novel, The Hunter, from the final one, Dirty Money, the character never ages. A thief and a remorseless killer, he has no tangible backstory and is never even given a first name. (As he goes by many aliases throughout the series, we are given every reason to believe that “Parker” is just another conveniently adopted identity.) He is a meticulous professional who dislikes laziness, recklessness, and waste, in contrast to the double-dealers and schemers that usually end up on his bad side 

Over the decades, there have been many attempts to translate the Parker novels to the screen. The most highly regarded remains John Boorman’s Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, and, over the decades, the likes of Mel Gibson, Robert Duvall, and Jim Brown have all taken a crack at the role. Notably, the protagonists of these adaptations were never actually referred to as Parker; they were given aliases like Walker, Porter, and Stone because of a stipulation on Westlake’s part that the name of his most famous creation could only be used if the producers committed to making a Parker series. This is, presumably, the plan behind Shane Black’s straight-to-Prime heist flick Play Dirty, which stars Mark Wahlberg as Parker—or, at least, a character with his name.

This isn’t the first time a studio has tried to start a Parker film series (there was, previously, the forgotten Jason Statham vehicle Parker, the first movie to use the character’s proper name), though calling Play Dirty an adaptation of Westlake’s fiction is misleading. It isn’t based on any of the novels (though it does borrow plot elements and characters from The Mourner, The Green Eagle Score, The Outfit, and others), and doesn’t really have much in common with the cold-blooded efficiency of its ostensible source material. What it has, instead, are hallmarks familiar from Black directorial efforts like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys, as well as earlier Black-penned scripts like The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight, among them quippy back-and-forth dialogue, shocks of abrupt black-comedy violence, and a shaggy plot that unfolds around Christmastime.